Tag: Union County

Union County Photo Trek

Posted on By Tom 3 Comments on Union County Photo Trek
History and Genealogy, Local, Photography

Pinckneyville Panorama

It started with a cryptic e-mail which began as follows:

Hello Tom,
I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I do know about your fascination with ghost towns.

Mark Elbrecht had contacted me through this website, and he had a proposal. Mark is a fellow Flickr photographer, and it seems that he and I have similar interests as far as subject matter is concerned. He had arranged to meet with a representative of the Union Historical Society and get access to the Pinckneyville site, a ghost town I’ve been wanting to visit for quite some time, and he invited me to come along. There was absolutely no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.

Union

My brother Houston joined me, and this past Saturday we made the trek from Greenville to Union to join up with the group. We arrived a bit early, so we wandered the main street of Union and took a few photos of the architecture, including the spectacular court house…

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Autumn Paddle on the Enoree

Posted on By Tom No Comments on Autumn Paddle on the Enoree
Paddling

Heading downstream

Kayakers – 3

Weatherman – 0

This makes three trips in a row where there was an iffy weather forecast. In each case, if we had followed The Weather Channel’s advice and canceled the trip, we would have missed out on a fantastic day of paddling. You’ve got to pay attention to the weather, but a 60% chance of rain doesn’t necessarily mean a bad day on the river.

Following on the heels of our last successful Enoree trip, David and Rick wanted to paddle another stretch of the river. They had done some scouting, and found a stretch starting at Whitmire that had great river access points. Add to that the fact that David had a new kayak to try out, and we had to put together another trip.

This was going to be a much smaller group than last time. Since the paddle route was longer, this just made sense. We would be joined by Dave W, a good friend of Rick and David’s, bringing our number to four.

Paddling Crew

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Scouting the Tyger

Posted on By Tom 3 Comments on Scouting the Tyger
Paddling

Bob on the Tyger

Our friends from Lowcountry Unfiltered wanted to do an Upstate River this fall. Since I’m the only one in the area that regularly paddles with them, I was tasked with finding a suitable trip. I had scouted the put-in and take-out points on a section of the Tyger River that flows through Sumter National Forest, and thought it might make a good trip. Today Bob Donnan and I scouted the section to see if it would, indeed, be a good paddle. Long story short – it wasn’t. However, it was a good day on the river, and that is always better than a day doing just about anything else.

I had my doubts about this trip. It had been raining all weekend, and when I got up Sunday morning there were flash flood warnings for Oconee County. However, I had the boats and gear already loaded onto the truck, and a phone call to Bob reported that they hadn’t received much rain. We decided to head on down to the river and check out conditions before committing to the trip.

I met Bob at our rendezvous point and we drove to the put-in at the Rose Hill Boat Ramp. Both of us remarked that this area seems “ancient”. There is very little development, and it seems remote. Sumter National Forest covers most of the region, and large hunt clubs have bought up huge tracts of land. The area seems almost mystical, as if just about anything beyond the realm of reality could happen.

Tyger-River-Rose-Hill

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