a dark and gloomy morning

It doesn't take much cloud cover to make it dark and gloomy beneath the leaf canopy of July in Georgia. Very little actual light makes it to he forest floor, and this morning, with rain approaching, it was so dim I had a hard time reading the map.

I covered a lot of area with little actual pencil marks on paper to show for it. I'm starting a new section since I had finished encircling the first area of "meadows". This is still the area west of the small power line. I like to start a new section by using a linear feature ( no matter how obscure) to define it. Not much luck finding anything here. I thought there would at least be an old road running down the spurs but there was nothing. I wandered out to the northeast where one of the old homesteads is located. This is the one with the corn combine and the large barn. I ended up walking the edge of the pine plantation (planted in rows running east and west) out a spur until I could join with a stream I had already mapped. There are several areas of pine plantation that will be on the map. I have mapped areas like this before at Joe Kurz, and will use the directional area symbol for them so that the orientation of the rows of trees will be obvious.

I still need to go back and do the "meadows" - but I will save that for a time when I have enough gumption to tackle it. It will be very important to the map to get the vegetation correct in those areas.

More pictures on the photo page.

Independence Day Mapping

Spent five hours this morning adding more area to the map. I'm still working in the deep forest surrounds the "meadows", saving the actual meadows for later. These hills are the closest to the river of any in the park, several coming right down to the water's edge. Also found the first depression along the river - about 50 meters long. I thought it was a hill on the lidar basemap since there were no tag lines - of course on the orienteering map there will be no doubt what is up and what is down.

Found another quartz pit, where someone (probably Creek Indians) removed all the quarts from an outcropping. One deer skeleton, several small cliffs, and the first of the open fields along the river. These fields are all man-made. Unless the park maintains them by cutting they will gradually revert back to forest. Check the photo page for more new photos.

On the technical side, I have not used the GPS since I started the map. As long as I keep in contact with the basemap so that I always know exactly where I am, it is much quicker to put pencil to paper than to go through the extra added steps of using a GPS.