Cumberland Plateau

We don't think of it as like it has to have pines to be there.

But the habitat where we find it up on the Cumberland Plateau in these acidic seeps.

So if y'all been walking through the plateau forest and you come across an area where it feels squishy, you start to see moss on the ground.

That's probably orchid habitat.

They may not.

But yeah.

We see those kind of isolated Cumberland plateau wetlands in these larger pine forests or pine hardwood forest.

And so at Savage Gulf, we've got the orchid in one of these little wetlands surrounded by mature pine trees.

What in sort of the land management perspective does kinda define its habitat if you were to find it in a good spot?

Yeah, if I, if I had to paint the picture of kinda the perfect habitat, we're on the Cumberland Plateau, um, so relatively flat compared to the plateau escarpment, where we have some of Tennessee's, you know, great overlooks and really steep bluffs.

We have this relatively flat, kind of undulating landscape, and one of the other great things about Tennessee is there's lots of water.

So we get lots of rain, we have lots of streams, rivers.

...

both from transpiration, both, a- and, and as well from sun, you know, sun getting in, drying out sites or, or not drying out sites, or whatever it may be.

Um, but yeah, it's, it's a really cool plant that lives in, in these pretty isolated wetlands on the Cumberland Plateau.

That's awesome.

Hume was flying around and noticed a lot of people.

clear-cutting on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, and that raised a lot of questions, but was that supposed to be happening? What's going on there? So he ended up flying several passengers from partners who were working on the ground on those issues already.

And from there, that's kind of where this idea got started of exposing environmental issues, learning about environmental issues, from the air to complement the work that advocacy organizations are doing on the ground.

Okay, yeah, very cool.

That's a John Harden race.

And that's one of the places I actually remember actually getting to talk to Keith a little bit was when I did the Cumberland plateau stage race, me and Mike never did the series.

We only came the day, whatever day the 50 K was was the day we always came.

Oh,

And that's kind of where the mountains are.

If you fly more to the west of Rockwood, you're kind of on top of the Cumberland Plateau and it flattens out a little bit.

So from 12 o'clock to six o'clock is where most of them, they're all about 15 to 20 minutes and a cub away.

And if you said my objective is to hit each of these and come back to Rockwood, what is that flight time, you think?

It's very rural, very inexpensive.

We've talked about moving to Middle Tennessee over on the Cumberland Plateau where my dad's from, Jamestown in that area.

All kinds of stories and legends over there.

It's very, very inexpensive too.

Even my dad, his experience was different.

Now, they weren't into all the supernatural as much as my grandparents.

grandmother on my mother's side, but my dad had some stories and stuff that he'd heard over there in the, uh, around the Cumberland plateau in that area.

Of course, over there, you've got haunted rugby.