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McCormick’s Creek to reopen two trails closed after last year’s tornado

By Ethan Sandweiss

Posted May 21, 2024

The Department of Natural Resources announced Tuesday it would reopen trails 2 and 3, both of which lie south of the creek and the main disturbance area.  (Devan Ridgway / WFIU-WTIU)

Over a year since it was struck by a powerful EF-3 tornado, McCormick’s Creek State Park will reopen two more hiking trails Friday. 

The Department of Natural Resources announced Tuesday it would reopen trails 2 and 3, both of which lie south of the creek and the main disturbance area. 

In a press release, central regional manager for Indiana State Parks Carl Lindell thanked workers.

“Marking trees to cut and then clearing them has required well-trained and experienced sawyers working in difficult conditions. Our staff and skilled volunteers have nearly doubled the available trail mileage since last fall.”

Many trails remain fully or partially closed, however, including those around the campground and Wolf Cave Nature Preserve. Assistant property manager Sarah Hamilton said the campground won’t reopen any time soon. 

“The front half of the park is going to look the same and operate very similar to what we have in the past,” Hamilton said. “The back of the park and the north section of the park where the tornado went through — that's going to be a work in progress for many, many years.” 

Assistant property manager Sarah Hamilton. *(Devan Ridgway / WFIU-WTIU)*

Swaths of the park have been closed since March 31, 2023. A tornado 400 yards across (about the size of four football fields) destroyed 282 acres of the park in under 40 seconds. Two campers were killed. 

State park employees and volunteers removed thousands of dead trees in the past year, which officials said in some places were stacked six to eight feet deep. Hamilton said the impact isn’t just natural or financial; it’s also personal. 

“There are multiple staff members that have been here 20, 30 years. They have an emotional connection to this property, as well as many people from the public,” Hamilton said. “Seeing it for the first time is not easy. But what we've tried to focus on, and what we'll continue to focus on, is the opportunity that this gives us to improve our infrastructure and improve our campground.” 

A 400-yard path of destruction through the park left by last spring's tornado. *(Courtesy of the Indiana DNR)*

The Indiana General Assembly included $5 million in the state’s biennial budget for campground restoration. Other recovery funds come from selling fallen timber to a contractor (Kinsey Timber Products), private donations and the Division of State Parks budget. 

Some of the salvaged lumber will also go toward replacing the flume at Spring Mill Pioneer Village's historic grist mill.

Recovery costs as of April 2024 were around $1.4 million, according to the DNR. That includes repairing cabins, shelters and sewer lines as well as designing a new campground. 

“You've got the thousands of trees, you've got the root balls, you've got the tops of trees that are still there. And then you've got the infrastructure damage, you have utility damage,” she said. “All of that is going to have to be addressed before we can even rebuild. 

Historic buildings were damaged in addition to nature. Cabins built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s had to be rebuilt. 

The tornado damaged the park on a historic scale, but it’s not the first time McCormick’s Creek has had to regrow. Until the 1960s, much of the campground area was open field, and in 2003 high winds felled trees in portions of the park. 

McCormick’s Creek is Indiana’s oldest state park, opened in 1916. 