Well, I guess I've ignored our blog long enough and now it's time to bring it up to date. January was a relatively quiet month. We made a very quick trip to Florida to deliver our Grand daughter's furniture for her new apartment in Tampa. Spent an overnight with my Son in Springchill then headed back to Tennessee. I know - I know - I said Springchill instead of Springhill and that's what we started calling it after SpringHill started booming. In my opinion the complexion of Florida has changed sooooo much with the heavy influx of the northerner's. They brought their typical "cold shoulder - don't get involved attitude" with them and Florida isn't the old, friendly, helpful Florida of the 50's and 60's. That's one of the reasons we left Florida and relocated to Tennessee. Now we're seeing more and more Floridians coming to Tennessee during the summer.
Anyway - in February we had some pretty nice weather which is kinda unusual. So Kristy and I took advantage of it and went on a couple of arrowhead hunting trips. Actually we just hiked but looked for arrowheads on the way. We started down the logging road to the falls to follow the creek down the mountain.
This is the view of the falls after we climbed down from the logging road.
This is the "rockhouse beneath the falls
And now you're looking downstream from behind the falls
The next 3 pics were taken as we hiked or climbed over debris while following the creek down the mountain. We continued until we encountered another dry creek bed that was coming from back up the mountain so we decided to start the return hike by following this branch. In the process we found a couple of interesting things.
Found this little gal peeking out. It's Bloodroot and they were all over the place.
This creek was a dry bed so we watched the gravel bed for possible artifacts. This pottery was our first find. I personally think it's quite old and predates our modern pottery. The texture is like baked clay with a dark, patterned outer covering. Haven't been able to classify it yet but I'm not giving up.
This was our next find and it was pottery again. I think this is more modern and probably from the late 1800's to early 1900's. It has a sandy clay texture and the lite blue pigment is probably from that period. However, still haven't confirmed it.
And then we found this. I know - it's broken but the identifiers are all there. It's known as a MacCorkle point or arrowhead and is between 6,000 and 8,000 years old. Hard to believe that you can find something that old but I've got a bunch different points and blades that are even older. Continuing up the creek we decided to start a more uphill climb and shorten our hike a bit.
As we walked along the cliff bottom, Kristy found a mini cave that was probably being used by critters as shelter. This cliff face is about 300 feet above the creek we were following. That pretty much covered our February hike but we did manage to get out again and took Hunter with us. Lilly was in school but Hunter gets out earlier so we took him with us.
While we were out, Kristy found this artifact.
If you look closely you can see a wavy pattern across the edge of this chalcedony piece. It has been chipped away (knapped) by a prehistoric man to fashion a point but it broke off at the base so it was probably just thrown away. This stuff if pretty hard to work with as opposed to some of the flint or chert we have here on the mountain. It became part of our collection anyway. Hope this litany didn't bore you too much.
Just the other morning, Kristy went out on the back porch, which is about 8 feet above ground and when she looked down, she saw this.
At first we thought it was a coyote but it was too large and had too many mixed colors. After I posted the pic we found out that it is a Coywolf. The coyotes and wolves have cross bred creating a more aggressive and larger coyote. This one has been killing our feral cats that hang out around the house. He taken at least 3 so far but I'm gonna make it his last if he returns. They have never come this close to the house before. I guess that's enough for now. Til next time....
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