The BlogKor

SCC Trail day at Panola Mountain

Well, the forum at the Southeastern Climbers Coalition website (www.seclimbers.org) is acting up, so I am going to post this report here.

I posted some snapshots here:
http://www.spitfirephoto.com/akornphoto/albums.php?albumId=6923

In case you don’t know, Panola Mountain is a State Conservation Park about 20 minutes outside Atlanta. Its one exit outside the perimeter off I-20 East, so roughly the same distance as Boat Rock but on the other side. If you’ve never been there, Panola Mountain is, on a smaller scale, about what Stone Mountain might look like had it been preserved in its natural state. It is a big granite dome of the same general geologic formation (Nerd alert: correct me if I’m wrong) as Stone and Arabia Mountains.

We arrived on Saturday morning and were greeted by Manager Tim Banks and another ranger (anyone catch his name?). We had a pretty good turn out for a mini trail-day, maybe a dozen folks ready to rumble. Tim went over the ground rules and explained to us that the GA State Parks have been given a mandate to encourage new forms of recreation, especially for youngsters, in the parks. His sentiment (and maybe that of the Parks) was that young people are getting mroe and more of their knowledge of the “outdoor” world indoors, in climbing gyms, for example, and thus missing a lot of the experience, conservation sense and education you can only get outdoors. They want to encourage people to instead experience outdoor sports the way they should be experienced, specifically on our public lands.

The result: Panola Mountain, along with some newly acquired land, is now open to climbing, on a limited basis, with a special focus on getting youngsters out on the rock, and with an emphasis on preserving the natural resources and treading lightly.

There are some boulders you might have already seen on the trails out there, if you took the guided tour. Actually, it must say something about climbers’ affinity for guided tours that very few people had even seen these boulders, myself included, and if so, they had seen them “clandestinely”.

Anyway, this guided tour trail sort of skims the outer regions of the main boulders, so the idea was to relocate a new parking area near a previously gated-off lake and build a trail from this lake to intersect the guided tour trail, and explore some spur trails to the main boulders, especially ones that would be good for kids. (Again, please correct me if any of this is innacurate!)

It was great to see so many people out there! As I followed Zack Pitts down the trail, I looked up and gasped to see a house-sized boulder in my face. Zack laughed, “Yeah, pretty sweet huh?” If you’ve ever had the pleasure of walking around in a pristine, untouched boulderfield for the first time, you know the feeling. I think we built that trail in record time, but the challenge was deciding where it should go, over to those boulders or down to these boulders, or hey check that out!

Then we got to the “real” boulders and Zack and I stood there staring at an immanse, complex, intimidating Hyperion of a boulder. Apparently a couple highball cracks had gone down already from the “preview” or maybe from the bandit days, but we got to work right away on a sweet overhanging sloperfest round back. (after lots more trail work of course). Zack punched through to a high point while Steggo did some recon from the top, but lets just say, “no exit strategy.”

Pretty soon everyone hoofed it back to exchange shovels and picks for pads and shoes, but I had to leave at that point. I sincerely hope that someone topped that problem out. Really, I do.