My Side Of The Mountain Ebook Pdf 264 ((NEW))

The 28th edition celebrates not only a finished trail extending 272 miles along the Green Mountain Range, but 225 miles of side trails, and a century of Green Mountain Club publishing.

With this quintessential guide, you'll find the information you've come to expect in every GMC trail guide, but with updated trail descriptions, full-color maps, plus a new quick-reference guide highlighting campsite and shelter locations. The new guide is accented with art and photographs illustrating the changes in the guide over time.

The sculptor stayed several weeks at thenearby home of Samuel H. Venable, head of thefamily that owned the mountain, while he studiedthe great stone. Then he drew up sketches ofConfederate leaders riding around the mountain,which he submitted to a meeting of the UDC.

My Side Of The Mountain Ebook Pdf 264

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Lukeman had the curving face of themountain blasted off to a vertical wall 305 feetwide by 190 feet high. Although the steep arealooks almost straight up, the bottom of the cut madea shelf extending outward 42 feet.

Cutting into Stone Mountain had to be donemechanically since explosives can start a crackin granite that may run on for many feet. If anarea four feet high by two feet wide needed tobe gouged out two feet deep a jackhammer crewwould drill a row of holes almost touchingeach other down the sides and across the bottom,then a row slanting downward across the top.Wedges were hammered into the slanting holesuntil the block broke loose and plummetedearthward.

Whereas one man can hold a pneumaticdrill straight up and down to break up the pavingin a street, it took four men per hammer to drillhorizontal holes into the face of the mountain. Oneguided the drill and held it in place. Twohelped lift the heavy hammer. The operator did hisshare of lifting and worked the trigger. Allexerted what force they could to press the drillinto the mountain.

When such intense heat strikes granite themoisture between molecules is suddenly convertedinto steam, literally exploding the surfacecrystals, or flaking them off, as quarrymen say.Flakes fell away in a continuous stream. In10coarse, deep gouging, slivers as big as dinnerplates and half an inch thick, sailed off themountain like miniature red-hot flying saucers.

One thermo-jet torch could remove severaltons of stone in a day; more than 48 men coulddo in a week with drills and wedges. Carving withit was a one-man job. Two men trying to workin the same area would have bombarded eachother with hot rocks. Even one could expect somelumps. Exploding flakes popped out in manydirections, sometimes straight back, or ricochettingoff the mountain or steel cables. The operatorwore a plastic shield over his face, as well asmuffs to protect his ears from the roar of the torch,which was the dominant sound in the north endof the Park for six years.

The sheer side of Stone Mountain wouldseem a lonely place to spend six years, but theman who was up there never found it lonesome.He had a couple of aides to stretch the opposite endof the tape measure, help raise and lowerscaffolding and do other jobs, but conversationscould not be heard over the roar of the torch.

Everything about the work was a challenge.The danger was very real. I was aware everyminute I was up there that a misstep, or a littlecarelessness, could drop me to my death. Thewind helped keep me on my toes. When youhardly noticed a breeze on the ground, it could begusting at 50 miles an hour, first into your back,then bouncing off the mountain into your face.

The earliest history of the mountain was literallydug up by Lewis Larson, Jr., assistant professorof anthropology at Georgia State College inAtlanta. He explored the present bottom of thelake around the western side while the dam wasbeing built. Along with more recent artifacts, Mr.Larson and his helpers collected shards ofsoapstone bowls and dishes, carved and used byStone Age people possibly five thousand yearsago, long before early Americans learned toshape and bake pottery.

Pardo regarded as his most importantachievement the discovery of what he calledCrystal Mountain, a great mountain thatglistened in the sun and was surrounded withdiamonds and rubies and other precious stoneslying on the ground for the picking up.Unfortunately, Indians kept him and his mentoo busy for gem collecting at that time.

The mountain enacted its first role in modernhistory on June 9, 1790. President GeorgeWashington had sent Colonel Marinus Willet toconfer with chiefs of the Creek Nation and arrangefor an emissary to visit him at the capitol in NewYork. In that era of few addresses in the wildernessthe meeting was scheduled for Stone Mountainas a spot familiar to all the Indians.

After the war ended and the British left,McGillivray accepted a similar role with theSpanish in Florida. President Washington sent18for him, hoping to placate him and stop the depredationsalong the frontier.

Reports of the rock that was as big as amountain continued to arouse wide interest, butthey were descriptions given by Indians. Fewwhite men still had seen it. M. F. Stephenson, thefamous gold assayer of Dahlonega, wrote that in1808 an Englishman returned to London withthe story, but the location of the mountain wasso far from the Blue Ridge peaks that he thoughtit was man-made. The president of the Academyof Arts and Sciences in Paris addressed a letterto the Hon. R. W. Habersham of Savannah askingfor the dimensions and other data concerningthis vast relic of architectural grandeur.

One of the first literate descriptions of StoneMountain was written by the Rev. Francis R.Goulding, noted novelist and inventor, who spenthis later years at Roswell, forty miles away.Goulding visited the mountain on June 25, 1822,as a 12-year-old, with his father, a cousin, aCherokee guide named Kanooka, and a slave boynamed Scipio. The elder Goulding, a prosperous19merchant of Darien on the coast, had just recoveredfrom a severe spell of fever and recuperatedby taking his son to the mountains to visitwith the Cherokees that summer. YoungFrancis wrote:

Our ascent was effected on the southwesternside, where the slope is comparatively easy andwhere the otherwise baldness of the rock is relievedby an occasional tuft of dwarfed cedars orstunted oaks, which find a root hold in thecrevices. These trees, elevated a quarter of amile above the surrounding level, seem to be afavorite resort for buzzards, many of which werewheeling in graceful flight in the air around,and a greater number which perched upon deadtreetops, apparently resting from their laborsand watching from the convenient height forobjects on which they might feed in the levelcountry below.

We found the summit an irregularly flatoval about a furlong in length. The view from itwas superb. Not another mountain could beseen in any direction within a distance of twenty-fiveor thirty miles. The country all around seemedto be an immense level, or rather a basin, therim of which rose on all sides to meet the blue ofthe sky. To the east and south appeared a fewclearings, but in every other direction the forestwas unbroken.

The Stone Mountain wall must havecontained millions of rocks, for there were enoughto let men and boys test their muscles by rollingstones off the mountain for more than a hundredyears, until Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, hadthe last ones thrown off in 1923 to make surevandals did not start them rolling down amonghis workmen.

The Cross Roads became a favorite spot tohave breakfast for parties who climbed themountain to watch the sunrise. And everybodywondered that nature could make a compass asaccurate and a great deal more spectacular thanthe ancient Egyptians could do. The entire formationdisappeared in 1896 when quarrymen foundthat it was composed of superior building stoneand broke it up and let it down the mountainby winches.

Perhaps the first white settler to claimownership of the mountain was John W.Beauchamp. His descendants still tell how theirgreat-great-great-grandpa gave Indians forty dollarsand a pony worth about fifty dollars for the bigrock. They say he traded it to Andrew Johnsonand Aaron Cloud for a muzzle-loading gun andtwenty dollars. There are legends that a jug ofwhiskey figured in both deals.

In 1822, the year Francis Goulding exploredthe mountain, the State Legislature prepared theoriginal land grants. The mountain lay in sevendifferent land lots, which apparently wereawarded to veterans of the Revolutionary War.One lot went to the orphans of a veteran.

It is said that a man in Athens was awardedone of the grants. He walked the sixty miles or so tothe mountain to examine his property, and seeingthat most of it was bare rock, he swapped it fora mule to ride home.

Andrew Johnson, who already had a shotgunclaim to the mountain, was not one of thosereceiving grants, but he acquired bona fide titleto considerable land at the base and also themain slice of the mountain in time to build aninn, about where the Administration Building isnow, when the stage coach line came through in1825. The stage ran from the capital atMilledgeville by Eatonton and Covington toStone Mountain, then on by Winder to Athens28where the oldest chartered State University wasalready dispensing higher education.

The railroad had suddenly become so muchmore important than the stage line that NewGibraltar moved over beside the tracks. In 1847the legislature granted the town a charter asStone Mountain and also gave the granite knoll,which had been called Rock Mountain and StonyMountain, the official name of Stone Mountain.That year a spur track was built from the depotout to a point between the two inns operated byAndrew Johnson and Aaron Cloud.

In the Reconstruction Period, when Southernindustry was at its lowest ebb, the granitequarries flourished. Growing towns needed pavingblocks and curb stones. Buildings destroyed in32the war had to be replaced. William H. andSamuel H. Venable, as the Venable Brothers,expanded until they had acquired the entiremountain in 1887, estimating that altogether itcost them $48,000. The firm operated for seventymore years, extending the railroad line around tothe east side, where the finest stone was found. be457b7860