Five river towns, downriver from Henderson to Ashland
About 230 nautical miles of river, town to town downstream. Start at Henderson (KEHR), where John James Audubon ran a store and a mill; the businesses failed, the bankruptcy freed the painter, and the state park there keeps his name and his woods. Down to the Falls of the Ohio at Clarksville (KJVY), the only natural barrier on the whole 981-mile river, where the water drops away to expose some of the largest Devonian fossil beds in the world, 390 million years old. East to Maysville (KFGX), the old Limestone landing and boyhood town of John Colter, who met Meriwether Lewis here, joined the Corps of Discovery, and years later brought back the first reports of Yellowstone's thermal country. Then Portsmouth (KPMH), where 2,000 feet of floodwall became Robert Dafford's murals, and Ashland (KDWU) at the northern end of the Country Music Highway. River geography you read from the air the whole way: oxbows, locks, and the green line of the floodplain.