Southern Swing

May 22, 2021

Southern Swing

One of the things I like to do while visiting Indiana is to explore the state while I am there and there is no activity happening at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is the prime reason that brings me there each year. Even though I spent the first 25 years of my life living in Indiana, there are large swaths of the state that I have never visited or explored and seemingly endless fascinating things to do

This trip, I opted to take a drive south from Indianapolis to check out a couple of places that I had not had the opportunity to visit before, so I headed first south down I-95 to Seymour, Indiana. Seymour is a famous small town in Indiana due to its most famous resident John Cougar Mellencamp, who was born and raised there and continues to live nearby.

His song “Small Town” was based on the town of Seymour, which is typical of many such towns across the state and the Midwest for that matter. To honor the local hero, a huge mural of Mellencamp was painted downtown, which I wanted to see and was able to check out. Personally though, my favorite part of Seymour is the Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge, located just east of town.

The roughly 8,000 acre refuge was established in 1966 and is another place that I had never visited so I spent the better part of the afternoon, hiking and exploring. The refuge is mainly a place for migrating birds to visit during their migrations and as such there were not a lot of birds while I was there, but the lush late spring vegetation was just beautiful. There is a certain shade of green that the plants and trees achieve during this time that is at once soothing and welcoming and it was a sheer pleasure to hike the forested trails.

Approximately 290 different species of birds have been recorded on Muscatatuck and new species appear almost every year. The wetlands, forests, brushlands, and grasslands of the refuge provide excellent habitat for most Indiana mammals and several reptiles and amphibians, including the copperbelly water snake, Kirtlands snake, and four-toed salamander, that are on the Indiana threatened and endangered list have been found here.  In winter thousands of greater sandhill cranes spend the winter in the area, often spending the night in refuge wetlands while spending their days feeding off-refuge in harvested farm fields.

After visiting the park, I drove over near Bloomington, Indiana to seek out an abandoned water slide on the shores of Lake Monroe that is nestled in the woods. There is something about abandoned sites that attracts me, and I had been wanting to find the Zoom Flume, as it was once known, since first hearing about it. Apparently, it was a popular water slide attraction during the 70s and 80s but has long been abandoned.

No longer visible from SR 46, which I assume was once where the entrance was, though I could find no evidence of a former parking area or other infrastructure aside from the slide itself, the place has been reclaimed by the forest and is now only visited by graffiti artists who have covered literally every inch of the concrete slide with colorful, though not very inspired, graffiti.

Before returning to Indianapolis, I grabbed a couple of beers at two of Bloomington’s local craft beer joints, Upland Brewing and Switchyard Brewing where I also had a bite to eat before the hour long trip back to Carmel.