Feb 28 Forty Acre Rock Preserve

 

The Elf Orpine was brilliant today. The recent rain had filled in the rock depressions where aquatic vegetation grows and it was in full color. We saw just a few blooms - small white flowers pop out of the red structure of this stonecrop. Elf Orpine is found only in these wet rock face depressions in just a handful of sites, mostly in Georgia. Is is found in all of this preserve's rock faces, which, by my count, is 5 rock faces.

Naked water slide and waterfall sports the largest Trout Lily colony we have seen here.

These guys only bloom for several days and only when the sun is out. Since they are always facing down. it's hard to see the open flower. 

Here s the largest of the rock faces. I've heard it is 14 acres, not 40. Even if all the rock face acreage were combined, I doubt it would be 40 acres. 

Next up in the wet rock depressions is Pool Sprite. The leaves float on the water and will have a very small white flower. There were a couple in bloom today.

The erect leaved plants growing on the or near the moss are Wooly Ragwort. We saw one just barely blooming.

Another of the rare plants here, Puck Orpine, looks like Elf Orpine but it may not be as red and tends to populate the edges of the rock near the cedar tree line.

After our stroll on the big rock face, we head to the other complexes. They have a different character than the big rock face. They are smaller, have less declivity and more moss and lichen. Once our tour of the rockfaces concluded, we headed off into the forest to find the large boulder fields.  

At the bottom of the creek in a quite inaccessible spot, we found this mill wheel laying in the water. It seems like a very unlikely place for a mill. The creek water goes subterranean here and spills back in the creek from several underground channels. 

A couple of balanced rocks. How they got there, I don't know. Someone had tried to move the one below using a cedar tree as a lever. We removed the lever and fulcrum so no one else might be tempted.

Several of the rock had these odd shaped weathered holes. The mud dabbers liked them.

The final three rocks pictured here, form what we have named, the amphitheater. 

On this trip, rather than follow the creek down to old Rt 601 to return to the parking lot, we located a spot we could hop across the creek and take a short cut through the woods to the parking lot. More rocks punctuated this route, although we didn't spend any time looking closely at them.