Massie Creek Gorge, a must see destination

Heads up to all you Southern Ohio river and stream fanatics, Massie Creek Gorge is a must see if you really want to understand our rivers and streams. Everything that makes our streams special all concentrated in one location. Glacial melt? check. Spectacular scenery? check. Compelling local history? check. Indian mounds and earthworks? Old mills? Jokulhlaups? Adena? End moraine? Check, check, check. Wait, a jokulhlaup? What's a jokulhlaups? One of those animals in a Dr Seus story? One of those bad taxidermy experiments using using rabbit and antelope parts? Nope, a jokulhlaup is the sudden, violent and short-lived increase in discharge of glacial meltwater. That's the cool part about lots of places in the Little Miami watershed like Massie Creek, or Glen Helen, or Clifton Gorge or Siebenthaler Fen, they expand your mind. You end up googling things you would have never in a million years looked up otherwise. 
You see our geography is a little more involved than most. It isn't the typical water as rain forms little streams that cut their way down to form valleys and combine to form bigger streams the way we all think these things work. 
Instead starting about 300,000 years ago, much of Ohio was covered several times by massive sheets of glacial ice that expanded from the north. The most recent advance of ice, the Wisconsinan, arrived from Canada about 24,000 years ago and lasted until about 14,000 years ago. Some of these were a mile thick! And these giant sheets of ice bulldozed everything in their path creating the flat cornfield country we see in the central part of the state. And as they melted and expanded things got a little wild. You have probably seen those ice caves and under the glacier streams on the Discovery Channel associated with modern glaciers? Picture those on a grand scale, and giant temporary lakes  of dammed up water and huge floods when the ice dams broke. Giant rivers like the  ancient Teays River were formed and then wiped back out again. That's why so many of our streams in southern Ohio seem backward, with the steep hillsides you normally see in the headwaters of streams in the lower portion of the stream and the flat country you normally see in the lower portion of  stream in the headwaters. And connecting the two are places like Massie Creek gorge, Clifton Gorge, Fort Ancient gorge etc. And that's just in the Little Miami watershed they are found all over southern Ohio on streams like Rocky Fork, Paint Creek or in the spectacular scenery at Hocking Hills and on and on. 
And it's not just geology that makes Massie Creek so interesting. There is the tall Williamson Mound, thought to be an Adena Mound built between 500 BC and 100 AD. It stands about 30' high and is 140' in diameter. Then there is the Pollock Works. The Pollock Works is a Hopewell culture (100 BC - AD 500) ceremonial center. It consists of a series of earthen embankments ranging from three to ten feet in height that partially enclose a large, 120-acre, plateau located along Massie Creek. AND...on top of the walls there is evidence that there was a wooden stockade built atop the walls. Maybe it was a bit of a fort as well? Th jury is still out a bit. It seems there was layer upon layer of Native American people using the site over thousands of years. And the history keeps coming. That big waterfall you see by the upper parking lot. Well look close in times of low water. Most of Cedar Cliff Falls is manmade though you would never know it. It was actually built to harness the creek to power several mills way back in the day. If you look closely there are signs of past mills and other remains of early settlers all along the trail following the creek. Also in three places on the day these photos were taken water just spouted from the dolomite cliffs that line the creek like water from  garden hose from some of the multitude of springs in the area. Like I said a little bit of everything compressed into one spot. And the woods was filled with wildflowers inbloom.  If you haven't been there and love the outdoors, Massie Creek Gorge is well worth spending some quality time at.