Sunklands Natural Area/Missouri Ozarks/Pic Heavy

J

jonc123

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Dec 27, 2012
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What is known as the “sunkland” is the longest sinkhole in Missouri, nearly a mile long, 200 feet deep and 600 feet wide. It is so large that it looks like a normal valley. Four separate bowl-like depressions form the basin of the “sunkland” sinkhole valley. My wife and I visited 5 sinkholes in the area. All of them are large, it took a full day to explore them.

This is a depression at the end of the mile long sinkhole described above. It had several areas that had small ponds/marsh type areas. Picture below:

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One of the other sinkholes in the area, picture below:

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This is the smallest one we saw in the area; it is deeper than it looks; you could fit a large two story house in it! Picture below:

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We saw a ton of this going on...is this bear activity or something else? Picture below:

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Our home for the evening, picture below:

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What have we here? Picture below:

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A small fire to keep warm while we ate, picture below:

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And on our way out of one of the sinkholes we found an old wagon wheel laying here, picture below:

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Thats all folks!
 
jonc123 said:
We saw a ton of this going on...is this bear activity or something else? Picture below:

8570048708_d2f722c3aa_b.jpg
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That is a mystery. I have seen bear scratch marks on trees before but nothing that extensive. Have beavers in the area?

Great photos and nice rounds of pitchwood. That BK16 is looking mighty fine.
 
That looks like you had a good time. How long ago did the sink holes happen?

Is that tent made by Tarptent?

Jeremy
 
Eero said:
That is a mystery. I have seen bear scratch marks on trees before but nothing that extensive. Have beavers in the area?

Great photos and nice rounds of pitchwood. That BK16 is looking mighty fine.
Click to expand...

Bear tend to claw higher up, not near the ground. Elk, moose, and deer will do that to a tree from the ground to about 6 feet up, but you wouldn't expect to see fresh wood on the ground this time of year, though I've seen young moose that didn't appear to shed their antlers, I wouldn't expect them to be this aggressive. The top of the damage seems a little high off the ground for a beaver. I guess there's nothing in the pic to indicate scale. Were the trees healthy, or was the wood rotted or soft?

Could you see individual claw impressions in the tree? If so, I'd guess mountain lion/cougar, what ever you call them in your neck of the woods. Was there a noticeable smell in the area? Cool mystery!

Erik
 
tradewater said:
It's from feral hogs. Great pics by the way, where abouts in MO?
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Very cool, how high up a tree will they go? That's an awe inspiring amount of damage, how large do they get? Are they good eating, or just hunted to control population / damage? My only experience with them is in the SW with javelina, and all those I've seen have been small.

Erik
 
No beavers in the area....zero signs. Some feral hogs are in the area, but I am real familiar with them and have never seen them do damage like that (this tree was in the big sinkhole and I couldn't find any other hog signs at all). Off the top of my head, I think the damage was about 4 or 5 feet from the ground. The ground around the tree was disturbed very little, making me think it was not a hog, but it could be; I have no idea! I saw plenty of logs laying on the ground that looked similar, with the wood chips all laying around. I wished I would have taken some closeups now. We do have Elk that have been reintroduced into the Ozarks, but not in this particular area.

As far as the age of the sinkholes, I tried to look it up and couldn't find much. Millions, I am sure.

Google Missouri Department Conservation and Sunklands natural Area or just "Sunklands". Here is a picture of the sinkhole area, as big as it will let me put it on here. It doesn't have all of the roads. We went to Summersville and took HWY K North off of 17 to County Road K-B and made a right on it (you'll pass a sigh for the Sunklands before then on the left...not the same area). From K-B turn right on 360 and left on 370. This road will eventually fork but we parked at a large graveled campsite before this point as the road gets bad. From that parking area, hike towards where the road splits and take the fork to the right. The sinkhole towards the bottom on the left in the picture below that is labeled "1061X" in it will be on your right in less than 5-10 minutes, at a large mudhole...a brushy trail will lead down the hill on the right to this sinkhole. All the roads are not on this map.

To get to the big sinkhole to the North just hike back up to the road from that first sinkhole and hike about 1/2-3/4 mile down the road to it (this road is on the map for the most part). Eventually you'll see a very steep road that goes down into the large Sunkland. You'll need to find that road or you'll have a tough time getting down.

Notice the 3 sinkholes clustered together at the bottom and the long one just North. These are what your looking for. If all of this sounds complicated, it is...we had little trouble finding all of them, though. This Sunklands area contains 37,000 acres.

Below is a link to the MO Dept. Conservation map that will get ya to the area in general. The second one I printed up.

http://extra.mdc.mo.gov/documents/area_brochures/9511map.pdf

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cool stuff, thanks for sharing the pictures. Great photos. I like that torn up tree shot from the hogs, we've got hogs galore here and see similar stuff.
 
Thanks for sharing looked like an awesome couple of days, pack a big gauge loaded w/slugs next time and show us hogzilla!
 
Just about any hike I go on in Southeast Missouri or Northwest Arkansas I can find hog signs at some point. Off the top of my head I can tell you three state parks that are full of them: Johnson Shut-Ins State Park, Taum Sauk Mountain State Park (especially along Taum Sauk Creek) and Sam A. Baker State Park. Now, don't go hunting in these places or you'll wind up in a heap of trouble. The AmerenUE Taum Sauk Plant area is full of them also.

In the Mark Twain National Forest they are real heavy around Council Bluff Lake (South of Potosi). Just about everytime I hike a section of the Ozark trail and go off trail & follow the creeks and check out all the old farm ponds I'll find signs.

Northwest arkansas has them all around the Buffalo River and the Ozark National forest.

The Missouri Department of Conservation likes to lie about the problem also...I'll quote directly from a website article...."Trying to locate feral hogs in Missouri is like looking for a needle in a haystack." Well, thats a bunch of you know what. They estimate the population to be 5,000+. I think it is much higher than that. Do an internet search for "MDC" and "feral hog".

http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G9457#Distribution

http://mdc.mo.gov/conmag/2008/09/feral-hogs-bad-missouri
 
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Im in NWMO and we dont have them here. I spend some time at the lake and have never seen them there either. Id love to go shoot some, I will have to do some research on MDC land in south MO. As for the MDC lying whats new lol. They were still trying to say we didnt have mountain lions until different people shot 4 of them last year and had several other photos.
 
Psyop-

Don't know if it's any closer to you, but Fort Leonard Wood and the surrounding Mark twain National Forest have a lot also. If they still let ya, you can actually hunt within Fort Leonard Wood...you have to check in with them first. It used to be that way...you need a special permit & reservation...might not want to jump the fence!!

They do have hogs north of the Missouri River, but I am not familiar with the locations. a quote from MDC: "Right now we know that feral hogs are established in more than 20 of Missouri’s 114 counties. These counties are predominantly in the southern half of the state with at least one pocket of pigs north of the Missouri River."

I bet they have more than one pocket of pigs North of the Missouri! I can tell you 100% that some of my favorite hiking is in Iron, Reynolds and Shannon and Washington Counties. All of those have strong populations that are going nowhere anytime soon... 20 years ago when I really started hiking we didn't have these pigs like we do now. In fact, I didn't know that we had any. It gets worse and worse every year.

As far as actually seeing a pig, you really have to try. I do see them, but I hike and backpack a lot. I assure you they are pretty smart creatures and they know your there long before you see them. My wife is the prime picture taker, she keeps them on her laptop. I'll have her hunt up some pictures of the pig wallows we took at Sam A. Baker, that place was ate up with em'. We also have some pics of the traps they have set up.

When we find the hog traps (pens) on public property, often times they will have a game camera set up at the sight also. We have found several of these cams around the traps.

Be sure to get some tree climbing practice in, they have a top speed of about 30MPH I am told!
 
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