Don't Oxbow me!

Until today I was not aware of the Nolichucky River. The Cherokee named it "Rushing Water". It turns out it's one the most beautiful rivers in the United States. Originating in western North Carolina at the highest peak east of the Rockies(Mount Mitchell), it is considered one of the most spectacular whitewater rafting destinations in the eastern United States. It delivers its flow downstream past Erwin and Greenville Tennessee to the French Broad, a major tributary of the Tennessee River. The site of this Great Bend in the Nolichucky is about 6 kilometers downstream from Erwin. Although the bend's neck is surprisingly slender - about 170 meters wide at its thinnest - the height and competent bedrock of the divide suggests an abandoned oxbow lake will not be forming here anytime soon. The HRTM is derived from USGS LiDAR dataset LPC_TN_Eastern_TN_LiDAR_2016_B16. It was down sampled and rendered at 25 cm resolution in Global Mapper. The color to elevation mapping was done using a 10 m cyclic color palette, which provides an intrinsic set of contour lines. One byproduct is the clarity of any flat surface, such as the roadway that runs across the Eastern face of the divide.