On a quiet day, one can hear a distant roar echoing through the mountains and hollows along the Virginia/Kentucky border. That roar is the sound of no other than the small, but mighty, Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River, and for over 250 million years, it has been steadily carving and sculpting a wild and rugged mountain canyon, which came to be known as . . . “The Breaks”.

Laying at the northern end of Pine Mountain, the western-most wave of earth and rock created by the crashing of continents when the Appalachian mountains were formed, the Breaks are a geological phenomenon.

One-thousand foot tall, near vertical, sandstone palisades tower over the roaring stream below, acting as monuments to the incredible force that is nature. For five rugged and grueling miles, the Russell Fork descends three-hundred and fifty feet as it twists through house-sized boulders and plummets down waterfalls into emerald green pools.

At the upper end of the canyon lay the Towers, a pyramidal shaped mountain capped by shearing sandstone cliffs. The Towers ascend from the depths of the canyon, where it is almost completely surrounded by the roaring waters of the Russell Fork. It is as if the river acts as an impenetrable moat surrounding a prehistoric monument, an echo of the river’s persistence and a testament to the mountain’s resistance.

At the end of this geological heave-and-hoe, the Russell Fork bursts out of the canyon walls into a paradoxical landscape. Immediately after the stream enters Kentucky, it is welcomed by a gentle and flat countryside at the base of Pine Mountain. This area is known as Potters’ Flats, named for the early pioneers who settled there. A landscape, which bears no resemblance to that upstream, provides a place of rest for the small and determined stream, a gift for its relentless work to break through the heart of Pine Mountain.