Rope lines and canvas

Some times of "roughing it" while camping in a tent, in campground with picnic tables and flush toilets...in the Smokies (Smoky Mountains National Park) Great to have a place to park and unload car right on the camping site.

About 1992-4

The tent had poles and rope lines and stakes.

The canopy over the picnic table was hung by rope lines from trees, to keep rain from the 2 burner camp stove and eating area.  But we really enjoyed life by bringing little folding chairs upon which to lounge around a campfire (even if it was in a designated metal box.

My youngest son, Tai, enjoying his selection of reading material...I wonder what it was...

We even took our chairs over to sit by the river nearby.

I would spend some of my vacation when Tai was out of school camping.  If we were able to, we'd meet my middle son, Russ, and he'd join us for a camp-out.  He loved showing Tai things in nature!

Sepia Saturday (HERE) suggestion this week is about ropes and patterns, and I think I've linked to that, not to mention the thought of how clothes and towels would have trouble drying when out camping!

Woman Hanging Laundry from Tenement Porch. Manchester, New Hampshire (1936) New York Public Library Digital Collection 

Our theme image this week comes from the on-line digital collection of the New York Public Library. What immediately appealed to me about the image was the geometry of it and you may want to provide examples of lines and angles within pictures from your own collections. There again you may want to display your dirty washing in public - as ever the choice is yours. Simply hang your stuff out on or around Saturday the 29th April 2017.

 Today's Quote in thinking about things drying...

Dryness promotes the formation of flower buds...flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism.

Ann Haymond Zwinger

Tea Bowls

More of those little tea bowls, cups of about 4 inch diameter...but deep, so they hold a lot of liquid. Consider wine, whiskey, juice, soup, etc.

Today's quote:

“When you are able to silence all views and words, when you get free from views and words, reality reveals itself to you and that is Nirvana. Nirvana is cessation, is the extinction. First the extinction of views and then the extinction of the suffering that is born from these views.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Waterfalls of DuPont State Forest

The Little River provides beautiful scenery for many of the trails and falls in DuPont State Forest.

From  downtown Brevard NC, we traveled on a new route to me, to find waterfalls that I'd visited several years ago coming from the other direction.  Could we do it?

The map on the wall in downtown Brevard shows a relatively straight road over rough terrain, obviously misleading! It climbed in elevation and did enough switch-backing that some motorcycles were very happy when we pulled over to let everyone behind us pass our "slow moving vehicle."
I was relieved since we were enjoying looking at the little river by the highway.

We followed one direct road which turned into a gravel road (for the next 5 miles) so we turned around and went looking for the visitor's center on another road.  Instead we found a large parking lot for the High Falls trail, and a large building named for someone (sorry, I don't remember who that was) and only by process of elimination we figured it must have been the Visitor's Center.

By then we went on down the second road which went directly to Hooker Falls, where we found the shorter and easier trail that we were interested in.  It had been improved since I was there about 4-5 years ago. And a new pedestrian bridge leads across the Little River to help hikers go to the Triple Falls Trail.

Going down a gravel path to Hooker Falls is a gentle slope along the river.  I was happy to see how dry and warm the going was, considering there had been heavy rain all day Monday (this was Wednesday.)

There was plenty of white water, moving pretty fast. But the banks didn't show that it was at all high from the streambed.

Hooker Falls.

Yes there is a young barefoot man in yellow swim trunks standing at the foot of the falls on one of the flat shelves of rock.

He went twice under part of the falls, but came out in a few minutes.  There are quite a few shelves of flat rock, mostly under water.  We left before he did!

After enjoying seeing some dogwood in bloom (it was 80 degrees that afternoon) I finally found a patch of Galax at the base of this tree, which I remembered seeing on my first visit.

 It's illegal to cut or dig it up in this area.

We stood on the pedestrian bridge and looked upstream where the road crosses the river where there's a little island.

Looking downstream from the bridge we agreed this wasn't a river to go tubing down.  A bit too fast and bumpy!

Today's quote:

Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

Margaret Fuller