Natural Bridge

It's a familiar recipe: Rock, flowing water, and time. Lots and lots of time. What the Colorado River is to the Grand Canyon, pretty but unassuming little Cedar Creek is to Virginia's Natural Bridge.

The bridge, which lends its name to both the nearest town and the encompassing Rockbridge County, is 215 feet high (higher than Niagara Falls) and spans 90 feet over the Cedar Creek gorge. And it is in fact a functioning bridge—Lee Highway (US-11) crosses Cedar Creek here.

George Washington surveyed the Natural Bridge in 1750, leaving his initials carved in two different places, and Thomas Jefferson bought the land from King George III in 1774. For twenty shillings he found himself the owner of "the most Sublime of nature's works". (Presumably he made this pronouncement after the purchase, or the king might have held out for more money.) Guests at Jefferson's cabin included notables such as John Marshall, James Monroe, Henry Clay, Sam Houston, and Martin Van Buren. 

[Not Washington's initials, obviously, but the impulse to leave one's mark was still evident 105 years later.]

Jefferson also leased out a cave along Cedar Creek for the mining of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), an ingredient used in the making of gunpowder. About 1812, when gunpowder was an especially critical commodity, workers from the mine heard flowing water and discovered the "Lost River", a previously unknown underground stream. They blasted an opening, and the Lost River now spills into Cedar Creek upstream from the Natural Bridge. The prevailing geological theory for the bridge itself is that Cedar Creek too originated as an underground river, and that the arch is all that remains of the roof of a previously more extensive cavern through which the creek flowed.

[The Lost River.]

In geological time, of course, Thomas Jefferson "owned" this land just moments ago. Title is currently held by the Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund (VCLF), and the land has been managed since 2016 as a Virginia state park, with a view toward preserving the area's natural and human history, including the native Monacan culture.

[Wattle fencing at a re-creation of a Monacan homestead on the banks of Cedar Creek.]

[Slightly blurry owing to low light, but I like Jessa's portrait of a Louisiana northern waterthrush.]

[Cedar Creek.]

[Lace Falls.]

[Ancient eastern arbor vitae or northern white cedar, possibly the namesake of Cedar Creek though closer to Cascade Creek, a tributary. The tree died in 1980 but was estimated to be over 1600 years old.]

[And oh yes, an enormous stone arch.]