Back around mid-October, my boyfriend and I went on a photography/hiking trip to Indiana's largest waterfall (per water volume), Cataract Falls. It's located in West Central Indiana, about halfway between Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Due to the drought season we've been having here in the Midwest, the falls were at an all time low, so we were actually able to get close up and see features that were normally hidden by the river.
The Falls themselves are actually broken up into an upper and lower by about a mile or so of wandering riverbed. Geologically speaking, Indiana (and a good portion of the Midwest) was at one time at the bottom of an inland sea. Because of this, the primary rock is sedimentary in origin (mostly limestone, shale, clays, etc.) Cataract Falls is a great place to observe the layered nature of these stones and how water works to erode them. Even more interesting is what happens when a much harder stone is trapped within those layers and then eroded out through river action, as in the picture above "River at Work". In fact, because of the low level of the river, we were able to observe an almost alien moonscape that the river had churned out when it is running at full capacity. The imagery was fantastic! Who could imagine that such details were hidden beneath the water's surface?
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