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De Soto State Park, Alabama. March 2021.
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COVID and a cold winter has made me sluggish in Alabama.
Although my departure from Birmingham looms in June, I have visited only two state parks.
To have any hope of achieving my goal of visiting all of Alabama's state parks, I better get crack-a-lackin'.
De Soto State Park
I chose De Soto State Park as my third state park destination (after Tannehill Iron Works Historic State Park and Oak Mountain State Park).
I packed my lunch - a spinach/orange/mushroom salad + roast potato + roast chicken breast - and ate it in the parking lot outside the park's country store, before walking the 2.78-mile loop hike to Laurel and Lost Falls, which traversed along sections of the blue and orange trails.
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| De Soto State Park, Alabama. March 2021. |
It was a battery-charging sort of day to spend in the woods: sunny and brisk.
Trail markers for people like me
Oh, the glory of the oranges! The blues! The reds!
Not spring colors, but trail markers!
No befuddlement for this hiker! No getting lost!
'twas a magnificent thing.
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| De Soto State Park, Alabama. March 2021. |
In the photo above, you can see three (three!) orange trail markers! These trail builders and maintainers; they are my people.
Before the park: my Alabama blue mask mission
Less than two hours away from my Birmingham base, De Soto State Park was so close to the Tennessee and Georgia borders, it meant that ..... yes, there could well be, also nearby, an Alabama Welcome Center with the soft, robin's egg blue masks.
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| Screenshot, De Soto State Park, Alabama. March 2021. |
I decided to shoot up to Georgia before hitting the park, then U back into Alabama to recon the southbound I-59 Welcome Center for blue masks.
Quarry found! I bagged a blue mask for me and a blue mask for my imaginary, strong-but-silent-type husband, who lovingly awaited me in the car.
(I'd had a thought that maybe Georgia offered its own state mask, but after driving about 10 miles or so into Georgia, and seeing no evidence of a welcome center, I abandoned that adventure.)
Blue Alabama masks captured and contained, I headed next to the park for my picnic lunch and afternoon hike.
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| De Soto State Park, Alabama. March 2021. |
Nearabouts De Soto State Park
Cool nature-y spots abound in Alabama's northeast sector, and Fort Payne is a touristic center of same. De Kalb County, Fort Payne's home, is "Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four Square Miles of Scenic Beauty."
Hearkening back to my awakening to land acknowledgements, De Kalb County (and Fort Payne) specifically, had/have importance to the Cherokee peoples - their lives there, their internment, and their forced removal. (University of North Alabama in Florence, Alabama, has a land acknowledgement page here.)
But just as we recognize the indigenous people of what is now called De Kalb County, let's recognize other people who were interned as property here. Here are "Ex Slaves Tales" of De Kalb County, collected by members of the WPA Alabama Writers' Project during the Great Depression in the 1930s. At the 1860 census, enslaved women, men, and children comprised 8% of the De Kalb County population according to this map source.
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