I broke my two-week post-North Pole Photo Fast on a rainy day drive through the Deam Wildlands with two of my three oldest friends, guys I’ve known since 1969 and reconnected with the past few years: Tom Diaz and Pete Katsaros.
I also met my Limestone Post Revisiting the Deam column deadline by once again combining the personal and professional along the drive through the Charles C. Deam Wilderness and surrounding Wildlands in Monroe, Jackson, and Brown Counties.
College buddies, Tom, Pete, and I have gotten together two years in a row, this time with a plan to hike the Hoosier National Forest’s Pate Hollow Trail, which got washed out. So, we hit the back roads from Brooks Cabin to Elkinsville, a ghost town that was once “bathed in the shadow of Browning Mountain.”
The column, tentatively titled Driving for Pleasure and Other Recreational Legends in the Deam Wildlands, is one piece of a long-term Limestone project called Revisiting the Deam and will be published on July 7.
The news hook is a shifting public forest management focus from logging to recreation, supported by both the Indiana Forest Alliance and Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, embodied in a bill supported by both that would dedicate the 57,000-acre Deam Wildlands for outdoor recreation and Lake Monroe Watershed Protection.
Braun’s recent decision to move Northern Indiana’s Salamonie State Forest and Frances Slocum State Forest to the State Parks, where they can be hiked but not logged, reflects a broader change of direction for the Indiana Division of Forestry.
More on that in the Limestone column and the future.
Since hiking was ill-advised, I decided to refocus on a recreational benefit that was once called Driving for Pleasure.
I took Tom, a software engineer who flew in from Lexington, Mass., labor lawyer Pete and spouse Joann, who drove down from Chicago, on a motor tour through the Deam Wilderness and surrounding Wildlands.
At 90 square miles of old-growth forest, these Hoosier National Forestlands attract 10s of thousands of deep-woods recreationists to the region to hike, birdwatch, mountain bike, hunt, ride, photograph nature, or just get away from it all, surrounded by a natural reservoir of life unlike any in the Lower Midwest.
Through a steady curtain of rain, we stopped at and/or chatted about Brooks Cabin, the Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower, Brett Kimberlin Lake, Browning Mountain, Nebo Ridge, Elkinsville, the Old Bridge over the Salt Creek Middle Fork, and the historic Story Inn.
Busy driving and talking, I only shot a couple photos, knowing that Tom is a talented photographer who did indeed bail me out for column art.
Here’s how Tom showed the woods are beautiful in the rain, The rest will be in the next Revisiting the Deam feature.
Photographs by Tom Diaz
