Pickett's Lake

Many is the angler who, having lashed a lake vainly with fly or plug, or plumbed it for empty hours with hook and sinker, has wished that the waters might suddenly be rent or snatched away by some miracle, exposing the bottom and, on it, all the flopping creatures whose presence has not been betrayed by appetite.

Last week just such a happening took place in the Sequatchie Valley, Tenn. Pickett's Lake, near Whitwell, famed for its trout, was emptied overnight. Natives found scores of trout, from a pound to five pounds, skittering, burrowing, gasping in shallow puddles in the mud basin. Smaller fish seemed to have escaped by routes which, when geologists found them, showed that the sudden drainage was no miracle. Two crevices in the lake bottom had. opened, presumably by earth contraction during a local drought, emptying Pickett's Lake into the Sequatchie River, a mile away.