Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Georgia Travelog #22
Helton Creek - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 6pm

Wow, what a packed day. We've done five hikes today in the Appalachian Mountains of northern Georgia. I knew it was an aggressive plan to begin with. Then, when hiking Anna Ruby Falls, getting lunch in tourist-trappy Helen, and driving to finding the trail for Horse Trough Falls all took a bit longer than expected, I fretted that one of these last two hikes would fall off the schedule. Nope! We made quick work of Trahlyta Falls, leaving just enough time to get over here (not that far away) to Helton Creek Falls.

The drive out to the trailhead seemed a bit strange. We turned off from four lane highway US-19 as it was climbing toward a mountain pass onto a narrow road that wound around through a deep-woods retirement/vacation home community. After a mile or so the road turned to packed dirt and gravel as it crossed onto National Forest land. There was little indication this was the route to a hiking trail except for one sign halfway down the road, then a small sign at a wide spot in the road big enough for 5-6 cars to park. From there a trail dropped to Helton Creek.



The trail description on AllTrails says it's a climb of 19'. That's wrong by 4-5x as it's more like 80-100' of climbing; half on the way in and half on the way out, as the trail both goes down to the bottom of the creek then ascends to two sets of falls. We didn't mind the extra climbing because the sights were worth it. Being right down at the water's edge below the lower falls (photo above) was nice.



Also nice was the view of the upper falls from a wooden observation deck. This remote and not well signed falls has received some love recently from the Forest Service. The trail is spiffed up with wooden beams forming the steep and otherwise slippery parts of the trail into steps, and there's a wooden deck here that widens what would otherwise be a muddy viewpoint big enough for 2-3 people into tidy space for 6-8.

Now we're back at the car and ready to head home. ...Well, not home, but Atlanta. We'll stay in a hotel near the airport tonight before flying home-home tomorrow. I'm concerned it'll be upwards of 3 hours of driving tonight, plus however long we stop for dinner. I won't know the driving distance or ETA until we get back up out of this canyon into an area with cell signal. Update: The drive to Atlanta was just 2 hours plus a stop for dinner. Nice!

Georgia Travelog #20
Hiawassee - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 4:30pm

Most of the hikes we've been doing this trip involve waterfalls. While we love waterfalls, we're not one-note hikers. Peaks, ridges, canyons, etc. are all fun to see, too. When I was researching our two previous hikes today, the amazing double feature of Anna Ruby Falls and the inaptly named Horse Trough Falls, I saw on the map that Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia, was nearby. How could we not bag the highest peak in the state while we're in the area?



Bagging Brasstown Bald doesn't even require a hike, per se. A public road leads to a visitors center 420' below the peak. From there one could hike the remaining elevation... or ride one of the park shuttles for $3. It was already late in the day when we arrived (after 4pm) and we still want to hike two more hikes, short ones, after this, so we opted for the shuttle.



Atop the mountain is another visitors center, a smaller one, with a rooftop deck that provides 360° views. The elevation here is 4,784' (1,458 m).



The view back down across the parking lot shows how much toil we saved by not hiking up. We considered hiking down but chose not to. We figured 1) the walk through the forest wouldn't be very pretty with most of the trees still brown from the winter— at this elevation the seasons are similar to Winnipeg, Canada— and 2) we've still got 2 more hikes we want to do, and daylight won't last forever!



I mentioned there are views in all directions from the top. This one (above) I found especially interesting because it's a view across 3 states. The near mountain ridge and the broad valley dotted with lakes are part of Georgia. The tall mountains in the mid-ground are in North Carolina. And the mountain in the far distance, appearing smoky gray, is Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee, at elev. 6,644' (2,025 m).

Georgia Travelog #18
Helen - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 12pm

Another day, another string of waterfall treks here in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia. Today I hope will work out better, weather-wise, than yesterday. The forecast shows sun all day.

Our first hike today was Anna Ruby Falls. It's in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, though to get to it we had to drive through Unicoi State Park. Fortunately there's no fee collected by the state for us passers-through. There's just a fee for collected by the US government. I know, *grumble* *grumble*, why's there a fee. Just pay it and be glad you did when you see how beautiful Anna Ruby Falls is— and that there's a big, well maintained parking lot here and a nice visitors center, too.



A paved trail leads about 0.5 mile uphill from the visitors center. Informational signs along the way explain the geology and flora and fauna of the area. At the top of the trail three observation decks provide plenty of vantage points to view the falls. This video is recorded from one of the platforms.

Curiously Anna Ruby Falls is not one but two falls. Two different creeks, York Creek and Curtis Creek, tumble over rocky ledges and combine at the bottom to form Smith Creek. A double falls like this is a rare thing.

Georgia Travelog #15
Three Forks - Friday, 11 Apr 2025, 2:30pm

Our second hike today was visiting Long Creek Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It seemed like it wouldn't be that far from our previous hike at Cane Creek Falls but then we realized our route involved 12-15 miles of driving on Forest Service roads. I..e, dirt roads. It's a good thing our rental vehicle is a crossover with AWD! Though in the past I've driven similar roads with front-wheel drive sedans.

Then again, things started getting a bit tougher on the drive to the trailhead when it began to rain. It was mostly just scattered drizzle while we were driving, but that turned into a steady pour as we arrived. Then it turned into a downpour as we started hiking. It's a good thing we brought our rain jackets today! Indeed we passed some hikers heading back to the car who'd bailed out before reaching the falls because they weren't prepared to hike in the rain.



Long Creek Falls is about a mile in from the Three Forks trailhead. It's a mostly gradual uphill hike the whole way. On the way in we saw a few other smaller falls on the creek with faint unmarked paths leading toward them. We wondered if one of those was our falls. Nope; the spur trail to the main falls was marked with a sign and blazes.

As we got to the falls there were about a dozens teens with a few adult chaperones there ahead of us. My first thought was Ugh. Teens can be noisy and chaotic and often don't care about the thing they're standing in front of. Frequently they're there because their parents forced them. These teens turned out to be fairly well behaved, though. They were part of a church group, and those who came on this trek did so because they wanted to. Thus they weren't doing things out of abject boredom like throwing every loose rock into the water and holding contests for who can scream the loudest. They also weren't whining incessantly about the rain. Though I think partly that's because they'd already been through way worse.... This church group wasn't day-hiking like us; they'd done an overnight atop the mountain. An overnight in a shelter while rain and sleet pounded with thunder and lightning last night! Thus when we arrived at the falls and wanted to take pictures, they politely made room for us.



If the teens were low energy because they were shell-shocked from laying awake most of the night during the violent weather (that's what one of their chaperones said) we were a bit low energy, too, because it was still raining and dreary. But still, waterfalls are waterfalls, so it wasn't hard to crack a legit smile or two while there.

You might wonder why the one falls pictures I've shared here is a selfie, especially after I included a selfie among other pictures from Cane Creek Falls earlier today and Amicalola Falls yesterday. Have I become one of those people who shares everything as a selfie? Haha, no. It's just a coincidence of a few circumstances.

One of those circumstances, a pretty significant one, is that I forgot my camera this trip. My spiffy, interchangeable lens camera, that is. Instead I'm taking all my pictures with my iPhone.

One of the things an iPhone (or any reasonable modern smartphone) does well is selfies. I like to explore the capabilities of whatever photographic tool I'm using. On some trips I shoot a lot of video when I'm using my iPhone. This trip I'm prompting myself, "Ooh, let's try a selfie here." So that's piece #2 of circumstance.

Piece #3 of circumstance is that a number of these selfies are simply good photos. When I review my roll of pictures after a trip I pick my favorites based on composition, lighting, focus, color saturation, mood, and story. Yes, that's a) a lot of factors and b) a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Photography is a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Selfies I've taken these past few hikes have been among the pictures I've liked best. And that's both technical and artistic. Technical, because the selfie camera on my new phone (6 months old) is way better than on older phones. It's able to deliver far better resolution, focus, light balance, and color saturation than selfies with older phones. In fact the selfie camera on this phone is at least as good as the outward facing camera on my previous phone. And artistic, because switching from traditional photos to selfies opens a new dimension of composition and story.

Long story short, I'm having fun exploring selfies, and I'm sharing a few selfie photos because they happen to be really good photos regardless.

Georgia Travelog #12
Amicalola Falls State Park - Thursday, 10 Apr 2025, 5:30pm

In my previous blog I remarked that hiking halfway up the canyon at Amicalola Falls was enough. We could tell that there weren't a lot of views to be gained by laboring up some 300+ more stairs, and we could get the view from the top by driving there. Indeed that's exactly what we did. We drove to the top!



And yeah, while the view from up here is nice, it's not let's-ascend-another-300-plus-stairs nice. 😅

What I Forgot This Trip

In the past I've joked that I forget one thing every trip. Of course that's not literally true, but it also seems not far from accurate. I often forget to pack something. A lot of times it turns out to be minor, something I can just as easily do without. Like forgetting to pack swim trunks when it turns out there was no hot tub at the hotel or I didn't have time to use it anyway. Other times what I forget is a doozy. On various trips I've forgotten to pack a clean shirt, clean socks, even underwear. 😱

What I forgot this trip is a doozy, though possibly not so... doozious?... as having no changes of underwear. I forgot my camera.

Now, you might be thinking, "LOL, how can you be like 'I fOrGoT mY cAmErA' when you've posted a picture in the same blog?" I mean, I'm pretty much never without a camera as there's one in my mobile phone. Actually there are four cameras in my mobile phone— and they've gotten really good thanks to onboard computational photography. But they lack some of the capabilities of my Fujifilm X-T3 interchangeable lens camera.

One of those critical capabilities is taking slow-exposure pictures with the help of screw-on filters to artistically blur the falling water at waterfalls. See for example this little explainer about waterfalls photography I wrote a year and a half ago.

In one respect forgetting my camera is even more of a doozy than forgetting a shirt, socks, or underwear. In each of those cases I simply bought what I forgot at a common local store. Buying a new camera is not something I can simply swing by Target or Best Buy for. I mean, yes, those stores literally sell cameras, but not the quality lenses and filters I carry in my camera bag on trips like this. And even if I could find such things at a specialty photography store, replacing what I left at home would cost several thousand dollars— not something to do on a whim. Or on an "Oops".

I'm still taking pictures this trip, of course. I'm just disappointed that I can't take pictures of the caliber and variety I'm accustomed to.

Georgia Travelog #6
Savannah, GA - Tuesday, 8 Apr 2025, 4pm

As of a few days ago we weren't sure what we'd do today, Tuesday, in Savannah. The weather forecast looked not-so-great, with cool weather and a chance of rain. Well, the weather forecast improved as of late last night. The storms passed through quickly yesterday— though they did make visiting the beach less fun— leaving today with clear and gently warm weather. We decided to do another day of self-guided touring on foot in Savannah today. And what a great day it turned out to be for that!

We started with a simple plan. It was as simple as 1-2-3-: One, search "things to do in Savannah" on the web. Two, filter out from that reasonably short list things we a) already did Sunday or b) generally don't like to do. An example of the latter is anything that feels too touristy... like ride a garishly painted tour bus around town. Three, pick a place to have lunch nearby whatever's left to start with lunch.

So we drove downtown at started with lunch at Clary's. It's a 1950s-ish diner serving a wide menu. And unlike many of the restaurants we turned down in our searching, it's not a gentrified place opened a few years ago designed  to look like an idealized 1950s diner, it's a legit 1950s diner with staff who look like they've been working there for 20+ years. Plus some fuzz balls hanging from the A/C vents that look like they've been there at least that long, too. 🤣

After lunch we walked to nearby Forsyth Park.



Like I noted on Sunday, downtown Savannah is studded with small city parks. We actually passed through a small park, about 1 square block in size, just walking to Forsyth Park. Forsyth is much larger. It has long promenades and a few fountains and memorials.



On the promenades to either side of the Forsyth Park Fountain (yes, that's its name) were artists and panhandlers plying their crafts. We chatted with a few of the artists. I met one who's from France and said she likes Savannah because of all these parks in it. "It's like a European city," she said. "Nowhere else in the US feel like home like this."

The other thing we'd picked out to visit today in our 1-2-3 planning exercise was the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. On the way to Forsyth Park, though, we found another house of worship we were curious to visit— the Synagogue of Mikve Israel.



Jewish synagogues aren't as common as Christian churches, or even specifically Catholic churches. But we seem to have a way to find them unintentionally when walking around. It's like Hawk has Jewdar (Jewish radar). Or maybe it's those Jewish mind-control space lasers MAGA-world was ranting about a few years ago. We waited a bit until the temple was open to visitors and then paid to take a guided tour.

This building dates to 1876 but the congregation Mikve Israel was founded in 1733. It's one of the oldest continuous Jewish congregations in the US. The founding families were immigrants from London, most of whom were descendants of Jews who fled Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition.

This house of worship is unusual, architecturally, for a Jewish synagogue. It looks like a Christian church! And not just outside but also inside, where the sanctum is a narrow, high ceiling nave with a transept (so it's in the shape of a cross!), and there's a pipe organ and a choir loft. The guide explained it's because the architects available in 1876 when the congregation was rebuilding after a fire were only familiar with building Christian churches, and neo-Gothic design was also all the rage. So they made it their own and also became the first Jewish congregation to have musical accompaniment with their singing.



When we visited the Basilica of St. John the Baptist later in the day it was hard not to see the similarities. I mean, the religious content of what's in side is different; one's a Jewish temple, the other a Catholic cathedral. But they have such similar shape (though the cathedral is larger) with the same iron pillars inside painted to look like marble (a common neo-Gothic technique) and stained glass windows all around.

One thing I found refreshing about this Catholic church is that it was open to visitors. So many other historical Catholic churches we've wanted to visit charge a fee just to walk in— and many even explicitly say that visitors are not welcome. So the fact that this one was not only free of charge but also free of "Thou shalt not..." rules for visitors posted on signs around the doors, was refreshing. Even better, a few volunteers inside gladly answered questions from visitors like us instead of sternly shushing us as if merely attempting to speak were a profanity. It's like it's a church that welcomes people outside the faith who come with curiosity and a desire to learn. Imagine that!

Saturday was a hiking two-fer for us. Thanks to staying overnight Friday night in Oakhurst we had plenty of time and energy even after hiking Angel Falls Saturday morning to add on a quick trek to Red Rock Falls around noon.

Red Rock Falls is on Lewis Creek, the same waterway as Corlieu Falls. We hiked Corlieu Falls Friday afternoon! We'd loosely planned that we could hike Red Rock Falls after Corlieu, making Friday a hiking two-fer, but the weather was crummy up at Lewis Creek on Friday afternoon. It was raining up there, hard. It was partly sunny and dry down in Oakhurst, though. The difference is that Oakhurst is at elev. 2,300' while the trailhead for Corlieu is at 3,900'. The rain was in the mountains, not the foothills. And Red Rock Falls is even higher, at around 4,200'. We saw small patches of snow near the trailhead on Saturday afternoon!



By hiking from the upper trailhead— the one with patchy snow— it was just 1/2 mile easy walk to Red Rock Falls. Well, the first 1/2 mile was easy; then a steep side trail dropped down to the falls. And even that just dropped down to the top of the falls, shown in the photo above. Waterfalls generally don't look great when you're standing right on top of them. Fortunately, here, a steep trail drops down to the left to reach the banks of the creek below of the falls.



We lingered for a bit below the falls. It was beautiful but also damp. The previous day's rain had left things soaked. Plus here, below the falls, it's shady and gets spray from the falls, so even on a dry day above it's wet down here.



In these latter two photos I managed to capture— or perhaps evoke— something that didn't seem to exist when and where I snapped the photos: a sunny day. Up here it was gray, at best bright gray, all day. But look: in these photos there's sunlight on the falls and blue in the sky above! For me, at least, seeing such things after the fact is one of the rewards of spending time taking pictures and touching them up afterward.

We got to the trailhead for Lewis Creek in Sierra National Forest a bit after 2pm on Friday. That would be plenty of time to hike to Corlieu Falls... and also Red Falls. But just as we drove up in our car and parked at the trailhead, rain started.

"We'll try waiting it out," we thought at first. Then it got worse.

The rain did get lighter again though not any lighter than when we first decided to try waiting it out. We grimaced and went about putting on our boots and zipping up our rain jackets. We've hiked in worse.



The trailhead for Lewis Creek, a National Recreation Trail, honestly looks dumpy right now. It used to be more covered in by trees. That made it harder to spot from the road but also increased the sense that, upon starting the hike, one was now "in nature" rather than near busy Highway 41 with cars rushing to and from Yosemite National Park.



It's not a long walk down to Corlieu Falls, probably less even than 1/2 mile, though on past visits I've met hikers unsure where it is. First you have to turn right when the trail reaches the creek. Next, you have to look for the trail continuation descending from the edge of a rocky plateau where there are great views of the creek and the canyon in the other direction. Then you have to carefully pick your way down a steep and loose trail to get to the bottom of the falls.



I brought my camera bag with me on this trek so I'd have my nice camera and my pack of filters— particularly my 6x neutral density filter. That let me capture the photo above with an exposure time of 1/6 (0.167) second. That slow exposure causes the water to blur like a silk curtain because it's moving. Unfortunately something else that's moving is the camera because I made this picture holding the camera free-hand. I tried to sharpen up the blurring from the camera shake, but it left artifacts in the photo as you can see above.

Ah, but I had another camera gadget with me. My hiking pole doubles as a monopod! I removed the cork cap to expose a metal screw mount and then screwed it into the mounting socket on the bottom of my camera.



This photo looks way better because there neither excessive blurring nor artifacts from post-process sharpening to attempt to solve the blurring. What there is, though, is my damn hand. Yes, that's my hand at the top of the photo above. I was covering the glass on the front of the lens because it was raining. While taking these slow-exposure photos (this latter photo is 1/5 second) I didn't want streaks or water droplets on the lens detracting from the picture. I thought my hand was out of the frame, but one challenge in working with the ND lens filter is that it makes the picture super dark in the preview. I couldn't tell my hand was still in the frame.

And the rain? Oh, it not only kept raining, it got worse. We decided to pull the plug on hiking further on the trail. We also decided to pull the plug on hiking to Red Falls in the other direction on Lewis Creek. "Maybe we'll do that tomorrow as a two-fer after Angel Falls," we agreed. And maybe I'll come back here as a three-fer to photograph Corlieu Falls without my hand!

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #6
Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Sat, 15 Feb 2025, 2:30pm

The Owl Canyon Loop hike at Lake Mead NRA has been a great hike. We started with exploring atop a bluff down in the canyon where we found seashells and gypsum deposits left from a flood over 40 years ago. Then we took a slight detour to the Slot Canyon River Rapids. After that we hiked up through the narrows of an unnamed canyon. It's a good hike already... and it's only about half done!

We topped out of the unnamed canyon, crossed the main road through the park, then continued through a wash to... another road? Yes, there's another road here. An abandoned road. One that's not even marked on the topo map we're following!



The topo map shows that our loop follows in the direction of the road for about half a mile, so we hiked it over the hill and down the far side. There we saw the next canyon our route descends into. At first it looked like we'd have to drop into the canyon then climb back out to the cross the road... but at the bottom of the canyon were a pair of tunnels under the road almost 100' below the surface. And they were haunted tunnels! 😱 Watch the video to see (or hear!) what I mean.

More to come....

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #4
Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Sat, 15 Feb 2025, 1:15pm

After starting hiking the Owl Canyon Loop trail on Saturday and spending a while exploring atop a butte we scrambled back down to the main trail and towards the mouth of one of the actual canyons. This part of the trail parallels the Las Vegas Wash, which drains from Lake Las Vegas, a small reservoir, to Lake Mead, which is a huge reservoir. We could see there was water flowing in the wash. There were also rocky spires, named as pillars on our topographic map, close to the water. Thus when our trail turned left at a junction— away from the river— I opted instead to turn right, toward the river.

Did I mention our map also showed one of these pillars next to a spot identified as "Slot Canyon River Rapids"? Yeah, there was no way I was not taking a detour to see that. And it did not disappoint. Here's a short video I recorded next to the river:



This river is both natural and artificial. It's natural, in that it really is a real river, the Las Vegas River. It drains the Las Vegas basin into the Colorado River. But it's also artificial—or, rather, its flow is artificial— because there's a dam upstream. But today's flow is also natural because it actually rained in Las Vegas two days ago. And not just a quick sprinkle but a full day. Las Vegas gets, like, two days of rain a year. So half the year's rainfall is pouring through this slot right now.