Oss asked for pictures from those of us who have clean roads to ride
in the winter. I've been riding, and fiddling with my new camera. I got
it almost set right yesterday, but the resolution is too low (fixed now I
think)... there's a little sub-postage-stamp sized lcd screen on it with
15 different icons which you have to be able to see and interpret,
neither of which I'm very good at, in order to get it set like you want.
Oh well, the resolution was still low yesterday, but at least it didn't
turn off after 300 clicks...
Just down the street from my house is Hicks Store (the little building
to the left). It must have been a happening place, it is marked in
The Red Book and until recently was marked when you looked at
google maps. It is a sign of the times what POIs they label on maps.
My pre-red-book South Carolina map book labeled all the churches
and plantations, the red book labels where the golf courses are
...
Our hoodlums still paint stuff like "dustin + caitlin" on the things they vandalize, at least
it's not gang graffiti or nazi symbols...
I remember when they were refurbishing this old house that had fallen into disrepair...
it is a nice horse farm now...
That's a fantastic bit of bottom land to the right, still in agriculture. It is been in
agriculture since antebellum times, the plantation house (named Walnut Hill)
is still in good shape and lived in at the top of the hill to the left...
This is Burnt Tanyard Road. As the name implies, there was a tanyard operation down
on the creek below those guardrails that burned down. There's a giant shoals down
there, you can still see some metal bits and pieces of the tanyard building lodged
in the rocks there...
That's not a little dog over to the left it is somebody's pet pig...
My intent on this ride was part of a continuing search for a good backroad route from my house
to the Eastatoee Valley in Pickens county SC. Lake Keowee is in the way, so finding a route that
doesn't dead end at the lake is not so easy. Eastatoee and Keowee and a whole bunch of
other names-of-stuff around here are Cherokee names, this area was the heart of the
Cherokee nation. These areas of Lake Keowee are the "high end" areas, movie stars and
rich people from all over have their second houses on the lake. Most of the roads that
don't lead to the lake are just country roads through the woods. Here's a place where
I was on a "regular person" road, going under a "rich person" road in a gated community.
The highway department hardly makes bridges as nice as this one
...
I've known about The Eastatoee Valley for a long time. When I was 14 they were just filling up
lake Jocassee which flooded part of the valley. I got to ride dirt bikes back in there once,
I was on my Yamaha 100, another fellow who was one of the mechanics at the Honda
shop was on a new 250 Elsinore. Back in the 90s when my mother passed :'( , my sister
and I split the money from the sale of her home and I bought three acres in the Eastatoe
valley. Uber rich people live down on the furthest back deep clean blue finger of lake
Keowee near Lake Jocassee. Notice that's not the part of the valley I'm coming out of
Duke Power used to own tens of thousands of acres back in here. They still own plenty, but
150,000 or so acres are now owned by North and South Carolina... the Jocassee Gorges...
This is quite a sight on a non-foggy day:
http://www.dnr.sc.gov/managed/wild/jocassee/index.htmA good thing about the uber rich... look how nice the road down in the valley is always
kept...
Our little three acre plot isn't out on the main road, it is down this little private road,
Ellenburg Lane. It leads to the Ellenburg's old bear hunting camp.
There's still Ellenburgs in the valley, here's their 200 year old home place:
The reason we were able to get three acres of their land is that some of the descendants
didn't care about bear camps out in the country and they sold off their inheritances... these
low resolution pictures don't do service to how awesome the Eastatoee Valley is. The Eastatoee
creek runs through it, it is clean and clear and a popular trout fishing creek. Back in the
protected part of the Gorge, the creek runs through areas of virgin timber. We've hiked back
in there... we'd go just so far one day and turn back to make sure we weren't lost. Then the
next time we'd go farther, until the last time when we were as far as you'd want to go
on a day hike. We'd see bears and deep gorges (hence the name?) it is real nice back
in there.
Way down at the far non-lake end of the valley, you can go to where the road dead-ends
into this dirt lot. You can park in the lot and walk 10 minutes down the trail to get
to Eastatoee Falls.
Not my picture:
-Mike
