Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Charles J. Farmer

Charles J. Farmer Charles J. Farmer (1943–2008) was the voice of conservation in the Ozarks. For twenty years, he was the outdoors columnist for the Springfield News-Leader. He took on causes, such as protesting the Las Vegas–style development in Branson. Individuals and organizations contacted him for support on issues of water quality, clear cutting, dwindling aquifers, and gun control threats. He was awarded Missouri’s Conservationist of the Year in 1992. He was inducted into the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame in 2001. Over the years, he and Kathleen Farmer, as a husband and wife freelance outdoor writing and photography team, wrote eleven books and countless articles for Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield about the adventure of living and basking in the outdoors, the heart of the Ozarks. His final chapter was Alzheimer’s. The next chapter is welcomed in hope of once again being in his heaven, his peace, and his church. It’s called the outdoors. qQ from Unspoiled Beauty I worked my way down the mountain through boulders and grassy terraces filled with cedars. Some of the terraces held shallow pools of water. Carpets of emerald grass, wilderness landscape of unsurpassed beauty, grew on the terraces and under the shady monuments of knobby, stunted oak trees. Beds of viola pedata, bird’s-foot violet, grew profusely in these natural rock-garden beds. Wild sweet 64 william, indian paintbrush, and black-eyed susan stood out like promnight bouquets. The open terraces and garden fields gave way to a splendid mix of white and red oak, hickory, sugar maple, white ash, and to a lesser extent, basswood and dogwood. The perfect forest, now untouched by the lumberman’s chainsaw and free of prescribed commercial management techniques, was doing very well. Shady cool, even in mid-afternoon, this is the travel zone of wild turkeys and whitetail deer—the place of food and hiding cover. The forest zone, as I call it, is for dreaming and talking to the trees. I sat there for a few minutes admiring trunks, limbs, and leaves. Then I hiked down to the bottom and, as my map had indicated earlier, found the Shut-in Creek Trail coursing north and south. Wilderness bottomland has a special quality to it—moist, aromatic , and junglelike, rich with grasses, flowers, ferns, mushrooms, may apples, blackberry thickets, spice bushes, sycamores, and river birches. It is in the bottoms of every designated Wilderness in the state that one of life’s rarest and most precious resources can be experienced —solitude! There is full-fledged insulation from traffic noise and other man-made audio clutter, utter silence save for birdsong, the gurgle of streams, and the faint rustling of leaves in the breeze. I trailed north at a leisurely pace and found “shut-ins,” or gorges, along the stream course. Shut-in Creek, like Joe’s Creek, Bell’s other perennial stream, is spring fed throughout its length. The bottomland streams of other Wilderness areas are intermittent and usually dry up in the summer and fall; only Bell’s are constant. Another unique feature of the bottoms are the steep talus slopes that intersect the stream course at several locations. Rocks and boulders along the stream are commonly carpeted with green and gray moss and lichens. A mix of trees, many of them river birch, grow thick near the water’s edge. I saw fresh beaver-chewed sticks scattered here and there. Elephant-shaped, rose-tinted boulders and slate blue slab rocks, similar to those found at nearby Johnson’s Shut-Ins and Elephant Rocks State Parks, have created gorges, miniature waterfalls, and bathtubsize pools of cold, clear water. The actual size of the pools reminded me of those just upstream from Mina Sauk Falls in Taum Sauk Charles J. Farmer 65 Mountain State Park, also close to Bell Mountain. Some rock pools were rounded out smooth and were just the right depth for dangling your feet or wading in, with water therapeutically ideal for tired feet that had been confined within beefy hiking boots for most of the day. I went a step further, shedding everything. Bracing my arms behind me, I slid gingerly from the base of a smooth rock into the pool until I was sitting on the gravel bottom with water up to my neck. The water was cold but gloriously invigorating. It was for me another refreshing lesson in...