Chattahoochee Bend Mapping Project

It’s mildly exciting to start a new page of the basemap – in a long project like this any sign of progress is encouraging. I did as much as I could above the big powerline north o the maintenance building, so this new page is west of the visitor center out to the maintenance building. [...]

A small portion of the brain trust of GAOC gathered together at the under-construction park for a meeting with our contacts from the Department of Natural Resources. We got an update on the construction and a tentative OK to begin planning an A meet at the park sometime in 2012 (hopefully the map will be [...]

I took another of those working vacations last week and managed to map 7 days out of 10 before the 4th of July holiday. Lots more pictures on the photo page. I worked the area west of Flat Rock Road out to the under-construction visitor center, which is about a kilometer away. I worked north [...]

That’s one of the hazards of mapping in the summer, the yellowjackets. They build their hive in stump hollows in the ground. The slightest disturbance and they aggressively defend their home. Grab a sapling for balance, trip on a root, or step on a wobbly rock that is near the entrance to their burrow and [...]

All is quiet, at least from the cicadas, at seven, and eight, and even nine. But at 9:45 they burst out with their incessant singing. I’m no expert, but it must be the temperature. They sing in the day, they sing in the night, so it can’t be the light. Once the temperature gets up [...]

I mapped the highest point on the map today. How high is it, you ask? Twenty-nine three meter contours above the river. That’s about 280 feet. Sounds like a lot, but it’s not, since the climb is spread over 2.5 kilometers. The new park road circles around to the east and north of the high [...]

Down in a stream bed west of Flat Rock Road I surprised twin raccoons playing and romping. What they were actually doing was hunting for slimy, scaly, creepy, and crawly things to eat, and then squabbling over them. But they were cute anyway. It was very dark down in that hole, but you can see [...]

A new progress map. This one includes McIntosh Reserve across the river for comparison.

From Chattahoochee Bend

From Chattahoochee Bend

Spring is here – those are the first mayapples. And I have finished the east map just in time, because I picked off the first tick. Here are the stats:
20 field checking trips
129 hours 45 minutes field checking
37 hours 15 minutes drafting
167 hours total for 2.9 sq km is 57 hours 35 minutes [...]

The week of mapping is over, and I did not finish the east map. The area across the creek turned out to be more complex and subtle than I thought. Good news for orienteers, bad news for the mapper. I spent two days trying to sort out the details of self-similar saddles, hills, and reentrants. [...]