When Pablo Escobar scotched my plans to photograph the Upper Amazon Rainforest in 1976, I turned to the closest jungle I could find to satisfy my innate desire to journalistically explore the woods – the Hoosier National Forest.
Exactly one year after my first trip to Colombia and precisely one year before my last, I had floated up a flooded Saddle Creek Valley surrounded by steep, densely forested Hoosier National hillsides. From the bow of that small wooden fishing boat on Lake Monroe, I captured my first images of what would become a lifelong photographic pursuit.
I didn’t know in May 75 that I was viewing the Hoosier National through a camera lens for the first time. But I did a month later when my guide and buddy Eagle Scout Tim Hoffman led my Irish Setter Shannon and I, full pack on my back, to a campsite on a ridgetop above Patton Cave, whose mouth overlooks the Saddle Creek.
The occasion for my first B&W Hoosier contact sheet was an excursion across Lake Monroe with Tim, an old college pal who rented boats at a quintessential Indiana bait shop called The Fishin’ Shedd. Indiana’s largest lake — 10,750 human-engineered acres — forms much of the 204,000-acre Hoosier National’s northern boundaries in Monroe and Brown counties.
Tim, whom I had met in the Pike House at Indiana University in 1970, was an investor in my Colombian importing business Steven C imports, on which I abruptly bailed after Escobar’s rise in 76 inspired American and Colombian authorities interest in the travels of hippie adventurers like me, ending my quest to photograph the world’s mightiest river.
Between that initial photo float with Tim and my first shots of the Amazon River at Leticia in June 2024, I conservatively estimate I’ve shot 10,000-plus images of the Hoosier. A search of my Mac Photos folder produces nearly 2,000 processed images and more than 50 folders holding at least 100 photos each.
I have no idea how many rolls of 36-exposure B&W and color slide film I shot of the Hoosier in my 30-year, pre-digital phase.
I began researching the Hoosier National after Tim took me to the wild and remote Nebo Ridge in Brown County in June 1976, where I shot my first roll Hoosier color slides. The Indiana Public Interest Research Group, InPIRG, had proposed 30,000 acres there for federal protection as the Nebo Ridge Wilderness Area.
My official journalistic exploration of the national forest began in 1985, when I was wrapping up my graduate work at the IU School of Journalism. The U.S. Forest proposed a Hoosier National management plan that would have clearcut 81% of the forest and located off-road vehicle trails in backwoods Orange and Brown Counties. My final masters project was titled Clearcutting the Hoosier National Forest: Professional Forestry or Panacea?
As the environmental reporter at my first job at The Herald-Telephone in Bloomington, I wrote continuously about the clearcutting plan for seven years, until it was replaced with one called the Conservationists Alternative, which had been written by the Hoosier Environmental Council
I have no way to estimate how many hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written on the Hoosier, but it was a key element in two of the five books I’ve written since 1995 and the sole focus on my latest: Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.
To be clear, the Hoosier is no Amazon Rainforest, although, 350 million years ago, the tectonic plate on which Indiana’s only national forest sits today was situated at roughly the location of Manaus, Brazil, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon.
The Hoosier is composed of 204,000 acres spread across nine Southern Indiana counties. The Amazon is nearly 7,000 times larger, covering 1.4 billion acres, supporting an estimated 344 billion trees in nine South American countries.
Still, the Hoosier is anywhere from a 15-minute drive to a two-hour excursion from my house. And it supports some of the deepest woods in the Eastern United States.
