Rock Gardens

Two more good days over the weekend. The weather was cold, but manageable. Finished the bare rock reentrant and crossed the far ridge line. Here the terrain is more eroded. The bare rock seems to have broken apart and left behind large areas of boulder fields. Some of the boulders are house sized. Not McMansion size, but as big as the house I grew up in.

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

Should be a lot of fun running around in those boulders looking for the right one. There are also more bare rock areas over here where the slope is steeper - something I didn't expect.

From Chattahoochee Bend

I also found an old homesite with a collapsed chimney and a well. The well is one of the really dangerous kind - at some point GAOC needs to get some volunteers out there to fence it off. Here's a couple of pictures:

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

Rocky Ground

My desire to take photos is inversely proportional to the temperature. The older it is, the less likely I am to fish out the camera, take off my gloves, and record a photo. But the temperature moderated, to a balmy 37 degress, and the sun actually came out for a short time, so I managed to get some photos of he bare rock area that I am currently mapping.

First, the new construction has begun. As always, they make a mess in the process of making something nice. This is the new park road for access to the visitor center. The old road (flat rock road) was dirt and ran right across a portion of bare rock. The new road will swing around to the east and avoid the flat rock.

From Chattahoochee Bend

The flat rock area is becoming clearer now. It is a shallow reentrant, about 300 to 400 meters wide and 800 to 1000 meters long, gently sloping down to the northeast. A reentrant that big is only noticeable on the map - standing there, you cannot tell. It looks like the terrain is either level or sloping away to the northeast. Imagine that it is doted with ponds and lakes, some as small as your living room, others as large as a football field. Now, mentally convert those ponds to bare rock and you have an idea of what it's like. The vegetation is stunted - I can only guess because the rock is just beneath the surface.

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

East of the bare rock reentrant, the terrain gets much steeper. Well, steep for Chattahoochee Bend, anyway. The rock has eroded and left huge boulders. More about that in future reports.

Back in the Saddle Again

Started the next section of the map 12/29/09 after a rest of a few weeks. This section is south of the big powerline and east of Flat Rock road. I picked the coldest morning of the year to do it which called for fingerless gloves. The camera refused to cooperate, even after I warmed up the batteries in an inside pocket, but I went out again the next day and managed to get a few pictures.

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

This area is very different. The river is far away - no floodplain here. Instead there are low hills, and cutting across those hills are the bare rock areas that gave Flat Rock Road it's name. I have only barely begun in this section, but already I have learned a few things:

• It's slow going - lots of detail that needs to be mapped - boulders, bare rock, rootstocks.


• the bare rock area has distinct vegetation. Stunted trees, because the rock is right there beneath the surface even if it is not visible; areas of grass and moss where trees cannot grow; complex patterns of green and white forest.


• the flat rock area is almost like a plateau, probably since it is resistant to erosion. It is deceptively flat, tilted down in a northeast direction.


• There are many more bare rock areas than are visible on the photo. Only the larger ones show up, so the photo is of limited use.


• The lidar contours pick out some of the largest boulders, which is very helpful.

This area will take a while. I know that, once I am off the plateau, there are huge boulders out to the east. I've already put more rootstocks in this area than in the entire previous sections, thanks to what must have been a mini-tornado that swirled across the side of one hill.

Construction is on-going on the new road to the visitor center. I am working east of the construction, but I still have to put up with the machine noise. The back-up alarm drives me nuts.

Checking the map

From Chattahoochee Bend

There's a smiling Kevin on the banks of the river holding the new map. He gave me some valuable help by coming out to cast another pair of eyes over the map. We covered a large portion of the northern map visiting most of the problem areas and discussing how best to represent them on the printed page. The many vegetation changes on this part of the map present the biggest challenge for the mapmaker. The weather was great (and dry) and it was fun to walk back over the map and look at places I hadn't seen in months.

I've decided to divide the remainder of the map into two sections instead of one. Flat Rock road will be the dividing line. I'll first work east of the road (where most of the rock features are). There are at least 3 sq. km. there. That should take me into the Spring. Then I will venture east of the road, where all of the park construction is happening. That is the largest section, something around 5 sq. km. With any luck and a lot of hard work I should be done in another year, by Christmas 2010 - but don't hold me to that prediction!

Stats from the north map

The log of my activity is on the Project Time page, but here is a summary:

238 hours and 15 minutes total time, which includes 151 hours of field checking, 45 hours of drafting, and the rest preparing the base map.

A little over 4 sq km mapped. That's almost 60 hours per sq km.

30 trips to the park, at 40 miles per trip, equals 1200 total miles of travel.

I started Feb 28 and ended Nov 15.

Now I will take a break. I will start the southern map (which is bigger) in January.

Week of mapping - Report #2

Hurricane Ida interrupted my week of mapping. Two inches of rain fell in one day.

From Chattahoochee Bend

This put a serious crimp in my field checking. I stayed home the day that it rained. Then went out on the tail-end of the rain the next day only to find it too deep for my boots - and the water was flowing instead of standing still. I took the next day off and went to do trail maintenance on the AT at Hawk Mt. Went out the next day only to discover that the flood crest from Atlanta had just reached the park. You can see the wet areas on the tree trunks where it is falling.

From Chattahoochee Bend

I worked around the edges of the flood as best I could for the next two days. Finally the water went down far enough that I could get back out there, and in one long marathon day I finished the rest of the floodplain.

Here's the river, back within it's banks:

From Chattahoochee Bend

An armadillo that didn't survive the flood:

From Chattahoochee Bend

And an old bus converted into a hunting camp:

From Chattahoochee Bend

Yes, that's a homemade fireplace where the engine should be.

And here is the biggest tree in the northern section of the park - it's probably the biggest tree in the park:

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

It's on a sandhill just meters from the bank of the river. Too high for Hurricane Ida to reach, but it was flooded in the 500 year flood, and probably many times in the past.

In fact, there was very little real damage from the big flood. Here's a huge raft of trash from Atlanta:

From Chattahoochee Bend

And finally, the early morning fog on the water:

From Chattahoochee Bend

Week of mapping - report #1

I'm taking a week off from my real job to attempt to finish the map north of the big powerline before Christmas. I've mapped three days so far, and been too tired each night to blog about it. Today it is raining, so here's the first report.

From Chattahoochee Bend

Rubber boots are required footwear. I went to Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest ones I could find. Can you believe there is still standing water after the flood? Here's proof:

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

You can probably tell that I am finally mapping the floodplain. I was waiting for it to dry out. I think it may take a while yet. Why is it still flooded? The floodplain is not flat. Working back at a right angle from the river, there is first a 10-12 foot bank, then a narrow ridge of sand 2-4 feet tall, then a depression 10-15 meters wide, then a sand hill 4-6 feet tall, steep on the river side, very gradually descending on the other side to a much larger depression that extends all the way to the first contour. This large depression is where the standing water collects. There is no path for it to escape to the river, and the ground is saturated after being under 21 feet of water. So it ends up looking more like the Okeefenokee than the Chattahoochee. In several spots ditches have been dug and channels cut through the sandhill by someone attempting to improve the drainage for farming. It hasn't worked and the ditches are all clogged now.

Once the rain stops I will don my rubber boots and head back out. I am about halfway done with the floodplain at this point - at least another 3 days are needed of field checking, and then hours of drafting...