Providence Canyon And Human Stupidity

When asked what interests us about any geologic area, or the specific features within a region, one tends to focus on sites formed by titanic forces such as plate tectonics, volcanism, or the unimaginably long-term erosive action of large-scale water movement. I knew intellectually that the activity (or inaction) of Homo Sapiens has, over centuries and increasingly in the modern era, caused significant change the to world in which we live, but I tend to think of that in terms of an abandoned junkyard or an EPA SuperFund site...

SO, it was with a fairly nonchalant, so-what attitude that we set off for a place about 60 miles east of Albany, right by the Alabama border, that the book calls 'the Grand Canyon of Georgia'. I was underwhelmed by the written description; this was a place didn't even EXIST until the 1800s. That's when settlers swarmed in, stripped the land bare of trees, and planted cotton and peanuts. What they didn't take into account, because they didn't know (or care!), was the effect of 1) removing the native vegetation, and 2) plowing their fields in a high-to-low pattern rather than terracing or contouring.

As I related in the previous post (and shame on you if you are reading out of order), under the 6-8 inches of topsoil is an ocean bed composed entirely of millions of years' worth of sand and kaolin (a claylike material often used in fine china). This stuff has absolutely no resistance to being moved about by water action; anybody who's ever spent any time by a beach knows how sandbars and shoals migrate day by day, appearing and vanishing seemingly at random.

The end result is what you see in the following photos. Within about 75 years the soil was gone, and the rain just washed the ground away, turning about a million acres of once-productive farmland into a blasted, alien landscape, a post-apocalyptic footnote to carelessness, ignorance and greed.

P.S. Congratulations to the U.S. Department of the Interior and Georgia State Forestry Service for their initiative in making the best of a bad situation. They have cooperatively turned the area into a wildlife sanctuary and a very well-run educational venue; the day we were there we saw two buses carrying students from schools as far away as Atlanta. THOSE WHO ARE UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO UNDERSTAND HISTORY, THEY ARE THEN DESTINED TO REPEAT IT.

P.P.S. Those who are interested in how human actions cause large-scale, sometimes-catastrophic regional changes should also Google 'The Desert of Maine'. We saw that place too last summer but, unfortunately, didn't take pictures so I didn't bother to post about it.

The View From The Rim:


Allison And Her Children, And Yes That IS A Creek They're Standing In:


RE The above photo: We hiked the entire park (about 11 miles) and virtually the only trails in the place are the actual canyon beds. They continuously run with ground water and seepage so we were VERY wet and muddy by the time we climbed out.

Sediment Layering; LOTS OF FOSSILS By The Way:


Remember, This Was A Cotton Field:


Another From Up Top; The Horizon Is In Alabama:


From Our Trip To Mars (OOPS, My Bad, Still Providence Canyon)


That's it for now. Remember, kiddies, everything you do, every step, every action, at some point you are will have to explain it, either to yourself or to your higher power (WHAT-EVER!). SO: I don't know about you, but I'm gonna try to make my footprints small and temporary.

Albany And This Weird Area

Southwest Georgia, southeast Alabama, and most of Florida were all ocean bottom until just a few thousand years ago (and may be again pretty soon, according to some estimates!); the whole area is still within about a hundred feet of sea level. That results in a number of odd and interesting geologic and sociological quirks that are new to us. One such phenomena is what's called a 'blue hole'. That's where the high water table and underground aquifers erode away soft sedimentary strata (limestone) just under the topsoil. Then the overlay collapses into the cavern, leaving a deep puncture that lotsa times just appears in the middle of streets, parking lots, and even under buildings. Whatever's above just falls in and is gone! Then, at the bottom sometimes dozens or even hundreds of feet down, there remains a spring that leads into caverns where the water flows. These underground courses have been followed by divers and seismological equipment for many miles, some even draining underground into the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic.

Anyway, here's one that was a park called Radium Springs (because of the radioactivity of the water) that has been a local curiosity here in Albany ever since this city was a winter escape for northerners in the 1800s. It is no longer used because in 1994 the Flint River flooded and destroyed the casino there; then FEMA condemned the property along the river and so it couldn't be rebuilt. It's weird because, behind the chain link fence, you can still see the gazebos and marble piazzas from the old park and, if you allow yourself, you can still see boys in knickers, small girls with parasols, men in seersucker with ladies in flowing gowns as it would have been in 1850. Interesting.


Another kind of cool site here is called the Flint RiverQuarium. It's a pretty pedestrian place except that, uniquely, is has a section where they have excavated to the bottom of one of the blue holes, and created a top-to-bottom viewing pit so you can 'be there'. This is fascinating because the aquifers forming these things have been more or less stable for a long time, resulting in evolutionary oddities like eyeless salamanders, albino trout, other familiar fish and mammals that never, ever see light, that spend their entire life cycles in the dark.

Here's a life form I found at the RiverQuarium that DOES have eyes:


This pose was NOT my idea, but this is a Blue Hole viewing port:


Anyway, this whole area is like the world's biggest sandbox; it's literally a beach (under a thin layer of topsoil) more than two hundred miles wide. See tomorrow's post for another regional oddity that couldn't have happened without that fact.

Bye for now!

If It's January, or February, This Must Be Georgia!

Okay, here we go. Seems like I'm on everyone's BAD BOY list for not keeping up, but one of the advantages of living this way is that there's not a rolled-up newspaper long enough for anyone to reach me with. I'll try to do a little of this every day, but since I'm a very busy guy with a lot on my schedule it may take a while (the Daily Show is on in about 10 minutes and then I gotta catch The Colbert Report; it is every American's civic duty to stay informed).

After staying in Texas for about a month and Christmas in Colorado, we hauled the RV from Dallas to Albany GA in two days with an overnight stop in Meridian, Mississippi. Lots of pretty country, but also some of the most discouraging, paralyzing, abject poverty you can imagine in a supposedly first-world country. This writer believes in capitalism, but some things cause reflection on the social services 'safety net' through which some of these people seem to plunge as though it were no more substantial than a rainbow-flavored illusion...

Anyway, we are now set up in a campground just south of Albany which, for those too lazy to Google it, is located in the southwest corner of the state. We are only about 60 miles north of Tallahassee here, so it is what they call a 'sub-tropical' zone which as far as I can tell just means palm trees grow and the bugs never die. Having said that, though, we have had weather that is largely comparable to Maine in the late summer, and which after all is the object of the exercise. Shirt sleeves almost every day in January, anyone? NOT BAD.

Allison's working the ER at Phoebe Putney Regional Hospital, a pretty big one that serves SW Georgia all the way to the Alabama line. She's NOT crazy about the place, says some of the people have a very poor work ethic that makes it hard on her and may even, at times, compromise patient care. She also allows, however, that the beauty of the Travel Nurse gig is that she can just arriva derci, hasta luego, bon soir and sayonara them in just over another month, so that's pretty cool.

That's about it for bringing y'all up to date on our circumstances. I'm gonna end this post here; see additional sections that'll be added today and tomorrow for the (several) side jaunts we've made since arriving here.

OK, OK..... I get it!

AND... I humbly apologize to the (obviously, see the comments for that last post) dedicated readers I left outta the 'exceptions' list (you guys I dissed: go see the [edited] previous post-your names have been added)!!!

ALSO: Forgot to mention, since I was just lookin' at Shelly's comment about how we'll be sorry leaving the boat in Maine:

WE ACTUALLY HAULED THAT THING BACK TO TEXAS! After we went to Nova Scotia, that next weekend we hauled booty to Dallas and back (about 4500 miles) in FOUR DAYS to get that miserable chunk-o-Fiberglass back home. Shoulda just sunk it in the Kennebec like all the other wrecks. Sentimentality can be a very expensive proposition. and there's no line item for it on a P&L report... my accountant thinks I belong on a funny farm.

November, December, And My Dereliction

Hey All,

I hereby submit my mea culpa for any of you that actually READ this thing. I have kinda gotten lax about posting because I become weary answering the same questions ad infinitum, queries from people (and you know who you are) that know full well where to find all this stuff but can't be bothered to actually go on line and LOOK at the thing. I think I have about 3 readers among the 70 or so folks that have repeatedly been given the Web address (and unending thanks to loyalists Shelly Parks, Anna and Jason, Ellyn Scholtz, Bob Shelton and Ken Burks, this vitriol is obviously not intended for you)...

Finally got outta Maine about Nov 16th, just TWO DAYS ahead of the 20 inches of snow they received there just before Thanksgiving. The snow caught up with us in the Poconos at Scranton PA, but it was light and we beat the weather by a you-know-what hair.

Spent the first night around Harrisburg, then one day with Bob and Patty Shelton at their home campground in Virginia (thanks guys, it was GREAT to see ya), one night in Tennessee, and the last road stop in a dump called Texarkana before arriving back in Dallas, two days before Thanksgiving.

We spent the holiday weekend with Chad and Michelle and the kids and stayed at a park right on Lake Lavon until leaving for Colorado for Christmas at the Broadmoor Hotel...

These are what it looked like there this year, we actually had a white Christmas...

A Peaceful Christmas Scene


Life Does NOT Suck


Coming next: We're off to south Georgia. Tired now from chastising slackers, more soon.