Mining a Richer Vein

“I can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t look like a body to me,” says Austin Bradley, the thirty-five-year-old superintendent of Breaks Interstate Park in the Cumberland Mountains. He’s addressing his coworker, Tim Cleary, the park’s adventure activities manager.

Bradley hands his binoculars to Cleary, thirty-three, who trains them on the Russell Fork River frothing seven hundred vertical feet below the caprock promontory on which they stand. Several visitors, sensing a drama in the making, loiter alongside them. It’s a Sunday afternoon in a dry October. The dense hardwood and hemlock forest blanketing the countryside—red oak, tulip-poplar, hickory, among a dozen others—is tinted bourbon and chardonnay, its normal electric autumnal reds and yellows dulled by drought.

Bradley is the overseer of the Breaks, as locals call it, a forty-six-hundred-acre preserve that straddles the border between eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia and which some people also call the Grand Canyon of the South. He wears a Glock on his