Snowpocalypse + Icepocalypse 2014: A Retrospective

It was a cold winter... just how I like it. I've enjoyed a cool spring season, only having just turned on the A/C now in June, and I thank the winter for that. We got a few snows in the South, and not just light dustings! Here's my car to prove it.

Okay, so that's not that impressive.. how about a snowman?

 

Alright, so there's no snow on the driveway he's sitting on, and the Jaguar he's blocking has been snow-graffiti'd. What about this snow that stuck on the road for multiple days??

At the very start of it all, I visited Toccoa Falls, and even IT was frozen over (or at least the water in its pool)!

That's all the photographic evidence I have to show for our multiple snows. There were lots of carefully thought-out drawings on cars (as the one on the Jaguar) and some guy named Richard wrote his nickname in the snow on top of one of the UGA buildings. Fortunately, I didn't experience the Great Atlanta Snag, wherein the highways iced over and completely scrambled rush-hour traffic. (Atlanta traffic is hellish enough on its own, as is driving on ice. Put them together, and it's a perfect recipe for utter chaos and disaster.) I'm also fortunate that there's no photo evidence of me sledding down a hill in a laundry basket.

The cost of gas to heat the house was out the roof, so I set onto some crafty projects wherein I sewed old t-shirts into rugs. The moral of this story is that I would like more winters like this one, and I am happy that I chose to live within walking distance of my office, perilous though the walk was a few days.

Shoals of the Skull

... or rather, of the Scull. (I suppose it has a slightly different meaning when you spell it that way.)

I'm playing a little bit of catch-up with these next few posts, so the pictures will not reflect the weather we're experiencing in the South right now (90 degrees and humid). Consider it a happy little flashback to the Winter of the Polar Vortex.

Anyways, Evan and I ventured down to Scull Shoals, a former mill town, now ghost town located at the very end of a State Forest road. It was quite cold, and the stream through the town was mostly frozen.

There are remnants of the company store, power plant, bridges and foundations, and the chimney of the manager's house. (Fun fact: the manager's well was located just downhill of his outhouse! Hmm.. cholera much?)

There were lots of interesting old trees, and likely some great old variety wildflowers this spring, though we didn't verify that. Something crazy that I saw for the first time ever was a Browse Line: in the following picture, you can see the distinct line in the trees below which there's no greenery left because the deer have eaten it all to that height. This phenomenon was fairly eery for me when I first saw it.

And plenty of lichen for Evan to add to his Wild Man costume, which is perpetually in the works. But more on that another day.