Pickett CCC Memorial State Park

People have used this part of the Cumberland Plateau for about twelve thousand years. The sandstone around Pickett and the adjoining Big South Fork is full of rock shelters, an estimated four thousand of them in the Big South Fork area, and hunters made homes in them. Between about A.D. 900 and 1000 the people of the plateau left it for good and founded farming towns along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and only hunting trips linked people to the high country for the next thousand years.

Pickett itself is a Civilian Conservation Corps park. In 1933 the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company donated about 12,000 acres to the state, and from 1934 to 1942 CCC crews built trails, a lodge, a ranger station, five cabins and Arch Lake, mostly from locally quarried sandstone. That original work is a National Register historic district. The park keeps a CCC museum, and its trails reach natural bridges, rock shelters and Hazard Cave.

Next door, Congress created the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in 1974. The river is one of the few in the eastern United States never dammed for power or flood control. Pickett was classed as an International Dark Sky Park in 2015, and on a clear night the stars here are worth planning a stay around.