PHOTO ARCHIVE: Hoosier National Forest – Waldrip Ridge

I’ve titled the April Revisiting the Deam feature in Limestone Post after my original color photography muse Eliot Porter’s 1963 coffee table book The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado.

Here’s the working lead to Waldrip Ridge: The Place No One Knew:

“Waldrip Ridge may indeed be the most beautiful and historic place in Southern Indiana that no one ever heard of. And after two hikes there exactly one year to the day apart – the latest with my friend and now fellow author Elaine Guinn – I can say definitively that Waldrip Ridge will in fact remain anonymous to anyone outside the fields of archaeology and Indiana history.”

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The ridge and late-19th century Waldrip family homesite are ecologically part of the Hoosier National Forest’s Charles C. Deam Wilderness Wildlands Complex and loom some 200 feet above the southern shore of Lake Monroe, west of the Ind. 446 Causeway.

I experienced my maiden adventure at the cabin shortly after the U.S. Forest Service purchased it in 1990, when the five-room structure was solid enough for upstairs exploration. It fell into disrepair and had to be razed after my last photograph of it in 2017 due to safety concerns.

These Waldrip Ridge digital photographs are among 8,000 Hoosier National Forest images that Indiana University Archives recently acquired for permanent storage and use by future academics.