Mapping the "Meadows"

It only took about four hours. Most of the variety that I had seen when walking through this area before turned out to be too small to actually map. What's the smallest open area you can put on the map? I added a few very small ones, but most of this area of old logging I was forced to map in different shades of green. Now the map has every color of green, from white woods to light green to the darkest stuff I would not send my worst enemy into.

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.

Power Plant Smokestacks

The new Chattahoochee Bend State Park is on the river between two power plants run by Georgia Power. Plant Yates on the south bank and Plant Wansley on the north bank. Today I got my first glimpse of the stacks at Wansley. It's doubtful that the Yates stacks would be visible from the park.

Four and a half hours in the deep woods. I have just about filled in the area west of the "meadows". Soon I will have to come out of the woods and tackle the much more difficult meadows. The deep woods terrain is very familiar to me - I could probably map it at a walking pace. Very little backtracking is needed and there is almost no change in vegetation. The vegetation changes are what make the meadows difficult for me. I have to decide what symbol to use. I have to treat the edges and boundarys as linear features and get them accurately placed.

Also found an armadillo skeleton today. The outer shell is about the texture of a deflated basketball.

Arrowhead pit?

Found a pit in my mapping today. Quartz rock had been dug out of it. I've seen this before, at Russell State Park on the Savannah River. It's possible that the pit was dug by the Creek Indians while looking for material to construct arrowheads. There's no flint here - quartz was about their only choice for sharp stone tools. Of course all that stopped when the deer trade began and the Creeks could afford to buy rifles.

The county name where the map is located - Coweta, comes from the name of a Creek town on the river, although I believe the actual town wasl located down near Columbus. The Creeks stayed around their towns in the summer and on their hunting grounds on the rivers and "creeks" during the winter.

I mapped five hours today in the heat. It was 93 when I got back to the truck at noon. I start at first light to beat the heat. It's not too bad really. I wear a long sleeve synthetic running shirt that is very light and white. Long sleeves to keep off the skeeters and the deer flies and horseflies. I also wear a bandana around my neck to keep the deer flies off.

Worked on the west of the "meadows" area. I'm just not up to tackling the difficult and detailed meadows in this heat. I worked the deep, dark woods, going up and down the spurs and reentrants, filling in the vegetation boundary on the west side of the meadows. It will be quite a job to get the vegetation cover correct in the meadows - a job for another day. I plan to work around them until I have them completely defined, then come back and fill in the different shades of yellow and green in the meadows.

Drafting has begun

I've always found it a good idea not to let the field checking get too far ahead of the drafting. The more time that passes  the more difficult it is to remember exactly what I drew on a particular day. Is that a boulder or a dead mosquito?

And I shudder to think of anyone else trying to interpret my field notes. The resulting map would not be useful. Orienteers would find trails where there should be roads, dark green where there should be open, boulders where there should be dot knolls.

One thing that I do with vegetation that helps a lot when it comes time to draft is to use the last two digits of the IOF number for the vegetation. I have a list of the numbers for that and other symbols taped to my board. I don't have it in front of me right now, but I think all the vegetation sysmbols begin at 400. So in the field I draw a line around the area and then label the interior with the corresponding number, like 9 or 11. I do the same thing with all the different road and trail symbols, using a solid black line for each and labeling them with a symbol number. I also do this for any other symbol that might be misunderstood or confused later. This reduces the chance of error when I draft.

So now I am up to date on the area north of the big power line along Flat Rock Road. That means about 0.7 sq km has been field checked and drafted.

My Experience

I had someone email me and ask what mapping experience I had, so I sat down in front of Ocad and did some measuring.

I started making maps for the Georgia Orienteering Club back in 1995. Here is a partial list of the maps I have made and their size:

• Cochran Mill - 3.5 sq km


• Sweetwater Creek State Park - 5.8 sq km


• FDR State Park - 13 sq km


• Joe Kurz WMA - 5.8 sq km


• Smithgall Woods State Conservation area - 11.7 sq km

That’s a grand total of 39.8 sq km of map, or 9,835 acres. Chattahoochee Bend will add another 12 sq km to the total when it is finished.