Mark's Photo Travels

A few weeks ago, I visited Dupont State Forest in North Carolina to find a obscure waterfall, Upper Grassy Falls, on Grassy Creek. My camera failed at Wintergreen Falls forcing me to settle for cell phone photos at Upper Grassy Falls. As I arrived, three other photographers arrived from the other direction. I reasoned they arrived from a different parking area, and now that I have a working camera again, I wanted go back and take better photos of Upper Grassy Falls. This time I went to the parking area for Grassy Dam Trail on Sky Valley Road, about 0.8 mile beyond the Guion Farm Access Area after a few steep uphill turns. This is the parking area I think those other photographers came from. The trail begins behind a gate at the parking area.  The parking area only has room for two or three cars, but I was the only there this day. Down this trail a short distance is an open field. An old Google Earth satellite view of this area from 1994 shows two structures, both gone.

Back in 2011, I stopped by here to visit the location of Reid School in Taylors, South Carolina under the assumption the school building was gone. Since then I've learned much of what older schools looked like from my association with historic school architecture expert (among his other talents) Tom Taylor at RandomConnections . Since then, I've also gained a greater knowledge of online maps, including aerial maps, to help learn the exact location of schools and other points of interest. This time I'm taking another look at Reid School and what I've learned from the free resources available in 2017. The land for Reid School was purchased in 1923 by the trustees of Reid School District #9-e in Deed book 76, page 170. One thing I've learned to be wary of since 2011 are dead or changed links. In the case of Greenville County's pre-1985 online deeds, the link template has changed once already. Here's a snippet in case the link template changes yet again.

I've been to Dupont State Forest several times over the years to visit its lovely waterfalls. All but one that is, Wintergreen Falls. And then recently I heard about an undocumented waterfall in Dupont State Forest, and that increased my interest in return visit even more. But first I had to locate this undocumented waterfall! I first heard about this waterfall on the Facebook group North Carolina Waterfalls . Those posting their photos of this waterfall were coy about its exact location, and asking them for more information would have been a waste of time. To get its exact location, I would have to find out on my own. My first step was to view a few photos of the waterfall to get familiar with what it looked like. A panoramic photo of the waterfall  by Christopher Cockfield and a photo by Dan Goodwin both showed a sandy beach area on the left side in front of the waterfall. (Note: I tried to embed these two photos, without success. Sorry!) I was prepared to pore over a