Petroglyphs at Track Rock Gap

 

Blairsville, GA  (high 81, low 60)

 

We’ve been enjoying our time here, but have gotten a little lazy, sleeping in past 7 am most mornings. The open windows and the cool breezes make for some mighty good sleeping, and we can’t seem to drag ourselves out of bed before daylight.  We have also been going out to eat too often, too many golf cart rides and  not enough walks and hikes.  We’re trying to improve.

Biking around here is tough, due due to all the hills, but walking is nice.  We’re hoping to find a place for a nice long bike ride, but so far we haven’t found anything relatively flat.

Here are some views from our walks around the campground.

Everywhere you walk, there is another hill!  It’s easy to get cardio exercise around here.

I love the “smoke” on the mountains.

The soybean crop is coming along quite nicely.

    

We sure couldn’t get our rows this straight when we used to garden.

The locals tell us that the bears slide down the hills and that these areas are called bear slides.  You can’t tell from the photo, but that’s a pretty steep hill.  We saw no footprints or other evidence a bear had used it recently.

We still haven’t seen a bear this year.

We enjoy walking by the river and streams.   A little fall color already?

We have enjoyed some time reading out on our deck, although it’s a little distracting with all the bird activity.

 

Yesterday afternoon, we took a drive to nearby Track Rock to see the petroglyphs.  I remember reading different blogs about the petroglyphs out west and I guess that was what I was expecting, we I was a little disappointed.

These weren’t quite the same, but interesting none the less.

We pulled into a small parking lot and saw a very poorly maintained trail.

With Al’s allergy to poison ivy, we decided we would not be walking that trail.

Fortunately, we soon found the correct trail.

It was a short walk to the site.

The carvings were believed to have been done over many years starting around 1000 AD.

The soapstone boulders are fairly soft and were also used to make bowls.

The carvings were a little hard to spot with all the white moss on the boulders.

 

Each boulder had many carvings, and there was a guide to what you were looking at.  I couldn’t see most of what was supposed to have been on the boulders.

 

We took the scenic route home, then spent the afternoon outside reading and watching the birds.

 

We took our usual early evening golf cart ride and spotted a large turkey family.

We normally stay on the back roads, but Al decided to take a different route home.  He thought he would only have to be on the highway a short distance and that we could ride along the side of the road.  We ended up riding down the busy highway for a good mile.    Probably not a good idea since it was “happy hour.”

He mostly stayed on the shoulder, but I was waiting for the cops to come and arrest us and throw us in the hoosegow.

We did spot this interesting sign.

Michajah Clark is from this area, and buried in an old cemetery nearby.

Some say, he actually built the first “flying machine” and held a patent dated 1874, which is many years before the Wright brothers.    So is North Carolina or Georgia really first in flight?

There is a replica of his first airplane in the courthouse here in Blairsville.  We will be visiting both the courthouse and his grave site very soon and I’ll let you know what I find.

Did the plane Michajah built, come before the Wright brothers?   Did he fly it off of nearby Rattlesnake Mountain?

I guess, we will have to find out.