Autumn Around The Pond

A few days ago I took some photos while the trees were in their autumn beauty in this area. The news said that last weekend was the peak time for the autumn scenery in the north Georgia mountains. Our trees here turn color later than that and many are still pretty here, so I wanted to show you a few pictures of autumn around the vicinity of the pond.

This first one is looking east from my porch toward our road out front. The horizontal line through the woods on left is the dam of the pond. A small stream runs between the house and the pond.

Looking northeast from the porch you can see the glen next to the small stream.

The scene here is southeast looking toward the driveway and Baker's front pasture.

Looking toward the west, the yellow tree-top in the middle of this picture is a huge beech nut tree.

This one is looking south from my yard, with Baker's back pasture in the far background.

Last but not least, here is the pond later that afternoon. Though the sun was getting low you can still see some bright colors in the tree-tops.
I hope you enjoyed my little tour around the area of the pond.

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Water Will Have Its Way

This week's theme for PhotoHunt is ruin(ed). As I was thinking about it I realized we have lots of things around that were ruined by nature over the past years. Rain, wind, sunshine, ice, flowing water, lightning, falling limbs and trees, and the actions of various creatures tend to wreak havoc from time to time despite our best efforts to avoid the damages.

As I was going through the list I recalled a particular sight that I have always found interesting. As many of you may know we live in a partially wooded area with several small streams. In years gone by I think perhaps a good portion of the land was used as farm land, probably for growing cotton. As cotton farming diminished in the area the land was used for other crops. This particular section eventually became a dairy with perhaps half of the land in open pasture and the remaining in hardwoods.

One of the streams happened to run through wide, low section before passing through a narrow area with a very steep hill to one side and a gradual 10-12 foot upward slope for about 60 feet on the other side. Evidently at sometime someone decided to build a dam to create a shallow pond perhaps only 2-3 feet deep and probably about 2 acres in size. I have no idea when it was built, but I would think it was likely more than 50 years ago and perhaps up to 100 years ago.

In any event, I think the dam was essentially hand built as it consisted primarily of a ridge of dirt covered by layers of small rocks. It was about 60 feet long and 3-4 feet tall at the highest point as you may be able to tell in the photo below.

I've always been amazed at the amount of time and effort that must have gone into that dam. Unfortunately, the builders evidently did not consider the amount and power of the water that might come through the area in the event of a large rainfall. (The stream bed drains an area of probably over 100 acres.) I have no idea how long the dam lasted, but eventually it failed. This is a photo from the downstream side. You can see where the water broke through between the steep hill on the right and the tree on the left.

This last photo is from the upstream side. You can see the size of the rocks used in the dam and just imagine how many hours went into building it. Most of the rocks are from the size of a fist up to the size of a soccer ball at the largest. One of these days I may work out a calculation of how many thousands of rocks may have been piled there. For now I just go check it out from time to time and wonder who built it and how long it lasted.


You can find more participants in the hunt at PhotoHunt.

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