Digitally capturing fall color was way down the mission list for last Sunday’s hike on the Hoosier National Forest’s Oriole Trail East. After all, Southern Indiana’s world-famous fall palette migrates from north to south, and the 6.5-mile spur-and-loop trail in northern Perry County is 70 miles south of Bloomington, where the annual autumn display had barely begun.
The primary goal was to explore a series of clearcuts, which the U.S. Forest Service refers to as “Restoring Balance” on an information signs, along the “trail.” I knew from YouTube research that the route followed a logging road, much of which was blanketed with discomforting rocks. Distance hiking therefore was not a priority, as well.
But I was maybe a hundred yards east of the State Road 66 parking lot when a brilliant blue sky conspired with a fiercely clear sun to illuminate a series of iridescent, trailside red hues. Together with deciduous greens transitioning to yellow and the few pines left retaining their evergreen hue, the Oriole East autumn exhibition surprisingly paled before none.
It took two trips last week to the 
I had forgotten about Anne LaBastille, a.k.a. the wilderness woman. I discovered this pioneering, earth-hippie-era teacher, writer, and photographer in the mid-1970s in a magazine article about her life and work in the Adirondack Mountains.
Explorer René-Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle was the first European to reach the Southern Indiana hill country, though his time here was limited to the eastern cusp of the deep V-shaped hills and valleys that today include the Hoosier National Forest.
