We had a lot of rain towards the end of last week, and then a little more on the weekend. There were flash flood warnings in the area, and the Oostanaula River was high and muddy. My drive over to Huntsville takes me over the Little River right above a waterfall, so Tuesday morning I thought I would see what the falls looked like.

Little River Falls

The falls here are somewhere between 45 and 60 feet high, depending on which source you believe. It’s not too high, but high enough to kill people when they are swept over the edge. The end of the Alabama Highway 35 bridge is to the upper right in this shot. I posted another shot of this waterfall a little while ago. (If you click on the link to the previous post, you can tell something about the time of day when I took these two, otherwise similar pictures.)

According to the National Park Service Web site for the Little River Canyon Natural Preserve, the Little River is unique in that it forms and flows for essentially its entire approximately 50-mile length on top of a mountain. It flows generally from northeast to southwest on Lookout Mountain.

Lookout Mountain was the site of a Civil War battle fought on its slopes near Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s probably better known now for its tourist attractions. If you have driven the backroads in the Southeast, you have probably seen a barn roof with a painted message saying “See Rock City.” There are also signs saying “See Ruby Falls.” Rock City is a tourist attraction near Chattanooga on top of Lookout Mountain. It’s a jumble of sandstone boulders that the fanciful can imagine to look like a city. The owners help that illusion with various elf or gnome figures located here and there. Ruby Falls is an actual waterfall deep inside Lookout Mountain in one of its many, many caves. You can take an elevator down to see it.

Lookout Mountain is very different from Lavender Mountain and the other mountains around Rome. Our mountains are what you expect when you hear the word “mountain”; they have slopes that lead up to a ridge, and on the other side of the ridge, slopes that lead down to a valley. Lookout Mountain and most of the other mountains to the west towards Huntsville, Alabama, are part of the Cumberland Plateau. They have slopes that lead up to a relatively level region that can be miles wide before you reach the downhill slopes on the other side. If you were put down five miles to the west of the Little River bridge, you would not know that you were on top of a mountain. On the other hand, you could probably walk from the Little River bridge to the eastern slope in about fifteen minutes. The width of the mountain makes it possible to contain a river, but the hard sandstone cap also limits the flow of the river. In dry weather, it shrinks to a trickle.

Little River Canyon

In this image, the waterfall and the bridge are at the top center. The Little River makes a big loop, with the highway running very close along one side. The edge of the mountain is where the highway curves and runs down along the right side of the image. This is a steep slope.

There is some question about how the Little River ended up on top of the mountain. One theory is that the limestone that lies beneath the sandstone cap was eroded by an underground stream, and eventually collapsed, leaving what we see now as a canyon. The other theory is that some unknown event caused a rift to form, which was eroded over time into the current canyon.

The Little River flows into Weiss Lake, which is formed by a dam on the Coosa River. The Coosa is formed by the confluence of the Oostanaula and Etowah Rivers in Rome. The rivers around Rome flow through wide floodplains, and they pick up a lot of mud during heavy rain. They are normally green, which indicates a good burden of organic material and sandy silt, but they are relatively clear. My father and I paddled a canoe a few times on the Oostanaula when it was flowing normally. When I dipped my paddle into the water, it gradually disappeared into a swirl of faintly glimmering silt. This weekend, the rivers in Rome were rich, red and opaque. On the other hand, the Little River was clear, even though it had a much higher flow than normal, mainly because it flows over rocky land and doesn’t pick up much muddy runoff even in heavy rain.

I think I know what the Little River would look like down at Weiss Lake. The Little River’s water would look dark as it flowed into the lake and gradually extended in tendrils into the muddy water. We used to see something similar where the Oostanaula met the Etowah. When I was growing up, there were mines along the Etowah that made the river muddy all the time. The Oostanaula’s green water and the Etowah’s red water mixed reluctantly at their junction, right at the end of Broad Street in Rome. The red eventually won, and the Coosa was muddy as it left Rome. Some years ago the mining runoff along the Etowah was stopped, and now it’s green like the Oostanaula. But right now, the Etowah and the Oostanaula are both very muddy, and I’m sure the lake is, too.