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.