Bump! I shifted my body to the right to avoid a huge hole. The Groveland Mines was crowded with dirt roads with huge pot holes and deep mud puddles; perfect for four-wheel driving. It was a sunny afternoon during the summer, and I was riding around the mine roads. Squinting up at the mines that loomed over me like giants; they were a grim reminder of the stress they had provided me.
I had always wanted to go visit my friends in Randville, but last summer I had no mode of transportation. After begging my father, he finally decided I was mature enough to drive my four-wheeler to Randville from Felch through the Groveland Mines. It would be a long trip, but I had filled my tank with gas and I was prepared for detours.
Knowing that I 've
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The map showed an arrow pointing to the very right, so I turned my wheel and started off on the farthest trail.
The trail was not very wide and littered with deep mud puddles. I had to constantly swerve back and forth to avoid getting stuck, but eventually I came to a steep hill. Pushing the acceleration, the wheels turned against dirt and rocks as I went up the hill.
As I came out into an opening, eight large white towers stood proudly in front of the towering mountain. Several broken structures were scattered around the field and large ores stood out of the grass like strange rock formations. I pressed on, wondering why the road to Randville would go through the mines.
The dusty road soon turned to dark ore and the trees were replaced with large iron rocks. The rocks made the road uneven and my tires on the four-wheeler fought against them. My senses came to me and I realized that no cars would travel across rocks that could potentially rupture a tire.
Instead of turning around and heading back like a sane person would, I continued forward into the mines, carefully navigating my four-wheeler around sharp broken rocks. Jewels glittered from inside the rocks; the sun shining and making them appear as gemstones, but I knew the broken fragments were worthless.
Pulling out my map, I peeked down at the poorly written lines. The trail I rode on still resembled the main trail to
The familiar sound of our tires on the dirt road signaled our arrival at the
After just a few yards on the road, it split off again, the left for cars, the right for bikes and hikers. In less than ten minutes I was standing at the parking lot, looking up at the Gardner Fire Lookout at the summit. The .7 mile Verna Dunshee Trail, which I did not take, circles the base of the summit, and there is a visitor center which is only open on weekends. There is also a restroom and a beverage vending machine that would not take my money.
Near Bethany, where Grant Line Road diverges from the Byron Highway today, the original dirt path forked. The left-hand fork, at first the popular trail, turned south toward Corral Hollow (modern San José Road takes its name from this fork). The center fork headed southwest to reach Middle Pass [Patterson Pass]. When the stage road took form soon after the Gold Rush, travelers chose the right-hand fork that scaled Livermore’s Pass [Altamont Pass]. Now, Grant Line Road between Bryon Highway and Altamont Pass Road follows this path’s bearing.
Life on the road is not suitable for everyone. Not everyone has the capabilities, personality, or intelligence to live their life on the road. In the novel Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer, the main character, Chris McCandless experiences discomfort on the road such as: starvation, dehydration, traveling on foot for many days, and many more. To live on the road is a personal decision that people, who are like McCandless, make. To begin, living on the road is risking your life on a game of chance.
The Great Smoky Mountains are one of a kind mountains. I was on the top of one of mountains; the view was breathtaking and was an amazing to see. I relate to Dellarobia’s awe from the mountains and countryside. Appalachia is a mainly rural area, with distinct people and landforms. There is diversity in this area. In some places, technology thrives. In others however, are lacking up to date technology. From one perspective, this is understandable. Every town is different and may not have every object the next town has. These places are isolated from industrial cities; many jobs in this area include farming, coal mining, and lumbering. However, looking at this from another angle, this is unfair to the areas without up to date technology. These areas could be in poverty and may not be able to afford everything new. This novel gives us an example of this with the Turnbow family and their
I never knew the Smokies were so close to my grandparent’s retirement village. Every summer all the cousins jammed into Grandpa’s Ford for our jaunt up the mountains. But back then the hills had no name. They were recognized only by the pop of our ears and the pink silk trees bowing down to the highway. Since those days I have grown partial to any patch of grass with “National Park” tacked to its title. Today the mimosas still tossed their petals to traffic, and the truck remembered its ever-present perfume of damp golden retriever. But today we were going to The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Cade’s Cove, next left,” the road sign read, and two bikes bumped along on the car hitch.
“We left our tire and wheel near the texas border. Somehow it had become more square than round” (Yates 130).
After the rockslide, the trail passes through a narrow corridor between the talus fields and the creek, passing through conifer stands and willow thickets. As the corridor gets narrower, the trail passes through several talus fields. You will then be forced to cross to the eastern side of the creek, as it constricts further. When hiking early in the season, you will have to wade through the creek, although the water levels are not high. Later on, the snow forming streams subsides, which allows you to rock hop to cross the channel without your feet getting
After waking up at site 18, having breakfast and cleaning up, we started up the trail. In retrospect, I would have gotten ready a bit quicker, as it was getting pretty warm as we approached the peak. However, the first three quarters to one mile offered a gradual assent, mostly in the shade and along the side of a creek for a time. We paused to enjoy a small waterfall along the trail. Then it started to climb a bit steeply, and the shade became occasional places where we looked forward to stopping to relax.
Just this past summer, under the hot, and sticky sun, we pushed our car to the limit, on our 1,000 mile journey to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, although in actuality we might have pushed our fears to the absolute limit. Flipping through the Colorado vacation brochure proved to have posed some interesting vacation destinations, such as "Big Bear Lake" and Trail Ridge Road. With the intent to get high in the sky, our family headed out the next morning to Trail Ridge Road, which is a road that takes you up to a staggering height of 12,000 feet. Although optimistic, we imagined of the vast fields of green, the glacier-topped mountains, and the valleys that undertake the them. As we climbed up to the peak, it seemed apparent that there
Krosin wasn't kidding when he said the road was bumpy; every five seconds the car makes a large dip, followed by Aspen sighing.
When I look at this picture, it remindes me of when i went hicking in the woods this weekend. I was out camping with boy scouts at a 1800 aker ranch that had a lake, longhorns, gunrange and lots of trails. As a group, we decided to chouse one trail in particular, the trai to the ranch house.
We are going on a road trip everybody! Let’s go to the Chain Rock in Kentucky; it will be so thrilling and it’s only a half mile walk there. Doesn’t that sound exciting? No, it isn’t exciting, the walk is more like a hike and it is challenging. No one that rarely hikes can even make it to the Chain Rock, because there is a massive boulder in the way so the trip is pointless, if you have those circumstances. Never go to Chain Rock, it is not worth the gas, money, or time. The trail of the half of a mile hike consisted of woods, heat, and disappointment.
I came to and looked around at the eerily familiar landscape, but something was missing. The house. It was gone. I slowly walked towards the plantation that I had visited so many times before, and as I grew closer and closer, I saw something peculiar. What was a rock doing in the middle of an empty field? The field was empty except for a single tree, which
The company, which included my great-great-great-grandfather, Stanford Smith, and his small family, had gathered in Escalante and left in the fall of 1879. When they reached the point of “The hole in the rock” in December, they were already utterly exhausted but had much work ahead of them. At the top of the gorge was a sheer 45-foot drop, and the rest of the way down was a very small passageway with a twenty-five to forty-five degree incline. With limited supplies, they began to carve a road.