BackWoods Drifter

This is a continuation of the last post.

The second day started almost as nice as the first day ended. I slept longer than I had intended. It was about 7:30am when the sun finally woke me up. I had wanted to get up earlier and catch the sunrise but I was pretty wore out from the previous day riding so I didn’t really mind sleeping a little late. I broke camp in about 15 minutes and headed over to where I took the photos the day before.

I actually had a few reasons for coming on this trip. At the top of the list was for the relaxation. I needed to get out for a while by myself. Another reason was to look for ginseng on the side of the mountaintop removal site in Schumate / Clay’s Branch. I have been talking a lot lately about how restrictions have been put on harvesters because ginseng is considered an endangered species, at least in Appalachia.

I didn’t have to look far. There are about six stalks of ginseng in this photo. Three of them are three-prongs and one of them is a two-prong. The others are just small new plants. I took this photo right around the mountain from the mountaintop removal site. I could go to jail for digging these plants but it would seem as if it is ok to totally decimate them with explosives.

Another reason for coming here was to get some more photos of the mountaintop removal site. This was the first time for me being there that early in the morning and I wanted some photos with the sun behind me.

On the map at the end of this post – this photo was taken where it indicates Photo 1. After some video and a ton of photos I headed off the mountain en route to the lower end of Clay’s Branch. This ride consisted of another couple of hours of nice trail riding.

From the top of the mountain, the trail was just like in the photos all the way to the bottom. At the bottom was Drews Creek road actually quite a few miles from where I initially went into the mountains. I had made a huge circle.

I went back out of the hollow and into Clay’s Branch from the Peachtree side. This is where I had to get off the four wheeler and do a little hiking to get where I wanted to go. I was on every kind of trail imaginable in the past two days. From a single lane blacktop road to a deer trail.

I’m about 100 feet down the hill from the rim of the mountaintop removal site. This photo turned out too bright because that is the treeline. It is hard to make out in the photo but I am following a deer trail. I wasn’t looking for ginseng but I couldn’t have missed these stalks. The one is growing right on the trail. This is about 50 feet from the site.

The stalk of ginseng is at the bottom of the photo and the bright light at the top is the end of the trees.

I was saddened by seeing the ginseng that close to the MTR site and on the dry side of the mountain. I couldn’t help but think about all of the ginseng that had been wiped from the Earth – on the wet side.

This photo is indicated by Photo 2 on the map. I stayed here for a few hours taking photos and video. I probably won’t go back for awhile, it’s just depressing.

At any rate, the last leg of the journey was a ride back home and just as good a ride as the day before. I didn’t get any photos coming home because in the course of the previous days riding I took nearly 300 photos. I filled two small memory cards. I’ll have to remember in the future to take plenty of extra memory.

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The green line represents the first day of riding. The blue line was the route taken from the MTR site in Drews Creek to the other side of the site in Clay’s Branch. The red line represents the ride home.

You can’t really give an accurate indication of the mileage simply because of alternating terrain.

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I have to comment a little on both of these posts. This is one reason I fight mountaintop removal. If King Coal has his way, I won’t be able to write many more posts like these. I would absolutely hate to see the day get here when there are no more backwoods to enjoy. In a lot of places it is already too late. Where used to be serene mountains and hollows now reside un-scalable mountains of debris.

It’s a travesty.