Sunday July 5th

The all-day Geology Field Trip on Sunday July 5th will begin and end at the Fairgrounds Campground in Corydon and visit multiple local sites in the larger Corydon/Wyandotte vicinity, including going east to New Albany to Falls of the Ohio State Park and then travelling south to Brandenburg, Kentucky. Departure time will be 9:00 AM. Lunch, bottled water, soft drinks, and snacks will be provided, but attendees are welcome to bring food and drinks in a small cooler that can fit under their seat. We will use modern air-conditioned buses with an on-board restroom. Each bus will have a locally knowledgeable caver geologist as a tour guide. The trip is suitable for teenage children. While a support car will follow each bus, we encourage those with medical or mobility issues to plan for an all-day trip to some remote areas, with travel on both mostly-paved and several unpaved pathways. There is also some modest vertical relief with shorter but sloped pathways.

We will start at the Campground with a trip overview and where the regional base level stream Indian Creek is adjacent to the bus loading area and a stream resurgence of the Binkley Cave system is located. We will then visit the Corydon Crushed Stone Company quarry located a few miles north to see the local stratigraphy and a panoramic view of the heavily karsted Mitchell Plateau, the Chester Escarpment and the Crawford Upland. We will then travel east via I-64 to the Falls of The Ohio State Park to see globally significant Devonian age fossils and the Falls themselves across from downtown Louisville, which are an important navigational challenge now and 250 years ago, with a large lock and dam operation. In route, we will travel up and down the Knobstone Escarpment, a significant regional physiological and stratigraphic feature. We will then travel west to see the panoramic view of the Ohio River valley at Leavenworth and a discussion of the formation of the Ohio River on our way to a short in-cave visit to Wyandotte Cave where we will discuss the geological and historical significance of the cave and the immediate heavily karsted vicinity. The trip then heads west back to Corydon and then south across the Crawford Upland and the Mitchell plain, crossing over the large Binkley Cave system and related sinkhole plain, stopping near an abandoned quarry for a discussion on the vicinity. We will then continue to the south to the Buck Creek/Mauckport Overlook Park for a panoramic view of the ancient deeply incised oxbow and a continued discussion of the formation of the Ohio River valley. Our last stop will be in the riverfront park at Brandenburg, Kentucky to see more of the Ohio River and to visit the Buttermilk Falls, a series of rainfall fed springs at the base of the valley wall and fed by the adjacent sinkhole plain along about a half mile-plus rolling walk on a closed county road.

Slated return back to Corydon by about 6:00 PM.