Vapor, Waterfalls and Friends

Today was a day of waterfalls.  Or vaporfalls, like this one at 10 this morning flowing over a mountain range to the west of Ministry Mountain, the home of Clayton First UMC, and us, for the moment.

You don’t have to be in the Smokies to be IN Smoky Mountains. All mountain ranges smoke when the atmosphere is right.  Gives a whole knew meaning to John Denver’s Rocky Mountain 

                        highs and Colorado’s retail marijuana shops, doesn't it?

We left home and headed south about 20 miles to the beautiful Tallulah Gorge State Park.  Carved out of the center of the Chatahoochee National Forest in 1993, this gorgeous valley of waterfalls and rock walled canyons was the scene of the river shots in the movie Deliverance and is now home to one of Georgia’s most popular resort sites.

The visitor’s center is more a natural history museum. The paths are easy and well maintained. The steps very nice, though many (over 1,000 down and back to the base of the gorge) and the gorge itself is one of the deepest, though only about two miles long, east of the Rockies.

A short 400 yards from the center is L’eau d’ Or falls overlooks…

 and just below that the Tempesta. 

The Hurricane is the deepest fall and the one the steel and wooden steps take you to the base of. A beautiful and very firm swing bridge crosses the gorge here for hikers.

  

The Oceana Falls are the gentlest. A sloped sliprock slide that Kayakers love to ride down.

In 1970 Karl Wallenda, the famous head of the Great Wallenda wire walking family brought his daring skill to Tallulah.  He died 8 years later in a fall from a wire strung between two of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s, office towers. Today you can see the towers he used, toppled but almost fully present (it seems a few steel supports have been burned off as someone’s souvenirs) to cross the gorge over Hurricane Falls.

  

As I was leaving the walk site I Googled the walk and found, to my amazement, that Nik Wallenda, the family member who walked one of the Grand Canyon gorges just the other year, is applying to the Georgia Department of Environmental Resources to duplicate his grandfather Karl’s walk on July 15, 2015, the 45^th anniversary of Karl’s walk here. I imagine he’ll put up new towers.

We continued south down several historic two lane highways searching out libraries and undiscovered country. And we found some.

Like GOATS ON A ROOF!

A fanciful place where goats rule.  Touristic to the max, but fun nonetheless.

The quaint town of Homer is the county seat of Banks County and while there is a modern new courthouse behind the original that original is a classic simple brick 1858 construction typical in counties throughout the south where there was not money for rich ornamentation.  It is a beautiful federal style structure from which you need no imagination to imagine an announcement of secession from the Union being proclaimed to cheering crowds below its second story balcony in 1861.

We were heading south to visit with Mona’s cousins, Lorna and Mickie-Mick-Mac McDowell.  Mick told us that at various times and in various places he is known by one of those three names.

It has been 25 years since Mona and Mickie saw each other last and it was only a couple of days ago that Mona discovered that Mick’s sister Nellie Ann had died recently. So a TOAD road trip was in order an hour and a half south from Clayton.

We talked and laughed into the night! Mac’s sense of humor is so like his cousin’s, Mike McDowell, that sometimes we thought we were visiting him, and their Christian faith was a dominant joy in all of our conversation.

Home by midnight, we leave Thursday for Greenville, South Carolina, and on the way will see new and as yet, undiscovered wonders of our country, the US of A.

-Ken