iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

He's trying & it's not looking good, granted. But then there's this. Humorous & in the ALT text I'm having a moment 🌙 But there are those of us out there (me a little more slowly that others) calling long haul attention to the plight of our National & State Parks, National Forests & BLM lands 🦉

"Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time." Theodore Roosevelt 🦉🌙

If ever I could conjure a person back to life in their prime, in his case say around 31 years of age; it would be now, and it would be this man.

The conjuring performed in the attic of the White House. Which his daughter Alice claimed as her own when told there was to be "No smoking in the White House."

Not a ghostly conjure, but in the corporeal state, each and every day for the next 1004 days, to strap on his favorite boxing gloves and spend each and every of those nights looking for a sparring partner.

"It is a good thing to look back upon what has been said and compare it with the record of what has actually been done." Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was speaking of looking back and self-assessing your own words, your own promises, compared to your own actions to fulfill them.

This Roosevelt did not need fact checkers. 🦬

Sigh 🌒💫

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

🦉 Slowly coming along, akin to the slowly rising tides. 🌙 #Atalaya triptych, third phase, from late March to now. #HuntingtonIsland #HuntingtonBeach #SouthCarolina

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

🦉"Flora Sprawl," #digitalphotograph #CarolinaCoasts This is a BIG tree—you'd be awed by is sheer audacity to survive no matter the declining odds. In a few years, it too will be a ghost tree 🌙 #Stunday #Nature #ArtYear "Endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.” #AmbroseBierce

A beautiful, sprawling oak tree, long a most natural resident of that magical region along the Southern Atlantic coastal zone, spreads its limbs, bark darkened by years of ocean spray, over a small alligator territorial spit at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina.

Alligators are not saltwater fans.

This is a very horizontal image. The sky is a soft grayish blue with faint white clouds in the distant background, the middle distant coast of the other side of the park a thin horizontal line is just below center of the image. The tree is rooted in a small knoll just three feet above the waterline; not nearly enough height to provide a barricade to the waves of an ocean storm any longer.

I've been shooting the ghosts forests, the ghost trees, all over, salt marsh tidal pools moving further and further inland.

This is one BIG tree, which if you were to approach it, you'd be awed by is sheer audacity to survive no matter the declining odds. In a few years, it too will be a ghost tree.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

"Atalaya Triptych," [work in progress] a #DigitalCollage (DCI) from the Digital Hybrid series, for 'The Parkways Projects." #TomOgburn I'm back, sort of in little dribs and drabs... #BlueSkyArtShow #Horizontal #HuntingtonBeachStatePark #SCPRT #SouthCarolinaStateParks #DigitalCollage #CarolinaCoast

The Digital Hybrids are primarily linked directly to the Hybrid Works.

Think of them as siblings...

When finished, it will be one of the first five or six of my large Digital Hybrids to be available in print form. It's about 65% done as you see it here. Stay tuned, the Sea Oats are coming (far less dangerous than "the Sand Snakes of GoT), plus a few less recognizable architectural features!

I'll be finishing this work up in a few weeks, and when done I'll do a Work in Progress string.

The composition is built of three primary photographs. The central one an interior view, the outer views worked into place as a digital collage puzzle, in a way.

Based on a place I've loved for years and years and years, yet, I've not seen it since these photos were shot there in March of 2023. The Ghosts Forests at Huntington Beach State Park have been growing faster (according to SCPRT signage) and I'm curious to get back there to see just how the salt water levels are settling.

It's an eerie thing to behold.

The composition is done, so far, in muted avocado greens and natural clay color, with rich deep reds in the bricks. Other elements are about to be added, almost as scrim layers on a stage, which will be foliage, trees, perhaps some of those scary sea oats!

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Here's an example of the better quality (fairly decent) versions available online. If any locates one that is an certified scan of an original print of this image, please, please hit me back with the news and a link?

This is a fairly decent example of what I've found online when conducting searches through the last decade for a higher quality scan, made from a much higher quality original Thiollier print.

Which I have yet to see, sadly.

It is only 72 pixels per inch ( I made a copy from a file I found to the same specs) 600x600 pixels. The contrast is far too dark, the trees in the distance too pale and washed out, and the digital artifacts are the same as almost every other scanned image I have ever seen online. Some have been attempted recoveries or restorations, but when starting from a badly artifacted older digital scan. My guess is that most all I have seen are replications derived from a single, older poor quality scan from the late 1980's-early 1990's.

If you look closely at his daughter's arms and hands, her right foot and the left tail of her coat, you'll see the digital halo artifacting. And this is an example of one which has had a lot of effort put into removing those artifacts.

If anyone does know a source for his works, an archive of his photographic prints in France where the works by his own hand exist, please do let me know. Especially if a better image of this photograph is in that collection.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Years ago, when I was teaching & doing an intro to a class and my work, one student immediately asked "What genre?" I'd forgotten I mentioned I wanted to write a novel. I was not paying attention in class. I had a long pregnant pause, finally answering them. "Southern Gothic Magical Realism."🌙 ⬇️

This image, a digital collage created to illustrate a very pronounced and prolonged dream sequence I've been having for years now, involves many vibrant assemblages of descriptions, memories and stories shared over generations in the two larger of the eight extended families I emerged from by some random happenstance. It’s packed to the gills with visuals.

It’s made to look like an old Brownie photo.

They are all interwoven, to look as though projected towards the viewer or that you are diving into them, similar to the original opening sequence of the old "Twilight Zone" television series in 1959.

It's hard to describe, but here's a try at it: there are three main elements, a young woman's photo circa 1952, a large face of a man with a goatee receding, disappearing in places. A playing card, an Ace of Hearts with a Southern Nettle tree displayed.

The colors are muted tans, bronze to gold browns and blacks. The colors of opthalmic migraine-induced vision, at least as experienced by me.

The photograph, to us all, is a bridge to a quiet and deeply spiritual memory which shears away from the science of the image. And the deep memory resides in that maelstrom of a universe of mind which I believe comprises a collective consciousness of all things, a great body of atmosphere in various modes and forms which serves as a stage for its performance within the realm of our own very fluid memory. A relegated space, but always malleable. Then, we imputed once a science of photographing moments and called the resulting images “proof.” An evasive thing.

What is visible "proof" to the eye? For eyes need no proof. yes are fleet. Photos are a much more spiritual, essence driven nature of the human spirit made static. The photograph, as Roland Barthes mentioned, just serves to say "We were here." I was so touched by that observation when I read it. It made all the sense in the world to me.

Even the photo border is nebulous, emerging from the left as nothing, into die cut edges.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

I'm on a very Large Learning Curve Roller Coaster over at Substack 🏄 at times rather daunting & often Sphinx-like but I'm finding the mystery. Missing #Bluesky🦋 #Stunday 🪔 Hurricane Junction Bridge #SesquicentennialStatePark #SC #photography #PhotographersOfBluesky #artprompt #EastCoastKin #ArtYear

A very industrial-looking silver steel bridge spans a new creek flow in Sesquicentennial State Park in South Carolina. These trees were heavily damaged ten years ago, and now, the verdant pine forest is recovering still, yet again we have a beautiful terrain. River cane has returned, and a promising blue sky covers far behind the trees. This is what we now call the FEMA Bridge, all who frequent the Park. For it represents a bond between the people and a Government Agency which once care for all in need.

This is a photograph of when things work, when needs are met and the people of a Nation are visited by relief and repair after such devastation. Here is what for a few years, through a number of tropical storms and hurricanes between January 2015 to January 2021 that through flood and fire, hurricane, tornado and cyclone, deluge of snow, an incredibly large swath of landscape in Sesquicentennial State Park, just outside of Columbia, South Carolina was altered forever.

But we all knew that relief would come.

In State Parks we are seeing fires and floods decimate the timber, the lands, even the waterways. In 2015 Sesqui was a disaster zone. South Carolina has had flooding now for ten long years, with prolonged seasons of record setting flooding many times. This is climate change, and FEMA was always there to help individuals, communities, counties and states recoup.

Until now.

Western North Carolina is still reeling from Hurricane Helene, encumbered by lack of bridges and road repair which never came.

Even when our Nation had FEMA fully operational, it often was the precursor, as in the case of Sesquicentennial, a tremendous outpouring of funds and volunteers, workers from other states and even some countries who sent help in as a welcome tide of support.

When will it return to us?

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Yay! 🌙💙🦋 I finally reached 600 followers for what I know is a very esoteric, historically inclined allegorical account 🌙🦉🪔 #GreatSmokyMountains #BlueRidgeParkway #Nature #SkylineDriveParkway #ShenandoahNP #Photography #History #Appalachia #ArtsYear #EastCoastKin

A scene, a little bit ominous, depending upon your point of view, perhaps. It is the lowlands, just below & adjacent to the remnant white sands of the Carolinas Sandhills region. It is a South Carolina State Park. It is where in many ways, my love of Parks & America's Recreation Areas began, although at the age of three to seven years old, I would never have been allowed to wander into these arenas, for this is a tributary to a swamp. It is the portal some of us adhere to in our reveries, our visualizations. It is to others a threatening place, full of danger & omnipresent latent fears; somewhat founded trepidations, for there are more folks today Nature considers a threat than they do her. They should be the wiser but there is no indication of such at hand.

I place my bet on Nature, for our world is trying to shake us off like a dog would rid themself of fleas. When this Earth finally shakes in earnest, we will be gone. At the same time, we will always haunt the Earth's surface, no matter it's configuration & we will be stymied by loss of orientation, for I doubt we will recognize even our own homes & birthplaces.

We will be lucky to recognize the wake of our own immediately trailing currents, our passages, our departures.

If you were to be standing here on this spot, at the same time of year of this photo being made, you would be seeing an emergence of spring, new grayish-green leaves in the softness of their velvety bloom. A sonorous enclave of otherwise quiet & subdued beauty, until you inch closer to the waters. Then you see & hear the Life teeming beneath the reflection of blue skies above, leaves & sky providing camouflage of faded shades of the brown spectrum & the darkness of the water where the gray bark turns to black, mirroring your face as you wonder at the beauty of such existence.

A black mirror indeed.

This is a panoramic image of three blackwater tributary streams converging within Poinsett State Park, between Sumter and Santee, SC.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

To all the memories of those who came before us, when things also seemed insurmountable. But during the span of the Vietnam War, the Senate and the House were not at polarized loggerheads 🪔 🌙 "Ninety-nine percent of wisdom is being wise in time."🦉 #TheodoreRoosevelt For links to my #Substack ⬇️

A portrait meme of AJ Muste, a Dutch-born American clergyman and pacifist who protested against the Vietnam War. A reporter once asked him, "Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?"

Muste replied, "Oh I don't do this to change the country. I do this so the country won' change me."

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

🦉 A Bridge Too Far #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #BlueSkyArtShow #Smooth #Nature An old bridge, but with a new & shiny guard rail assembly. Nothing like an allegory there, for we are not about that, no, especially not in Carolina Bay territory 🌙

A timeless square shot, of a bridge crossing the Little Pee Dee River in northeastern-most South Carolina. The day is still, white clouds calmly abiding ahead of blue sky. The blackwater mirrors darkly the sky above. Still water, currents only underneath, carrying secrets within its deeper recesses. The underside of this bridge is mirrored, casting a near-black shadow. It seems suspended through ebony reversal.

To read the full story:

https://theparkwaysprojects.substack.com/p/a-bridge-too-far

Just over a year ago, I began to wander my Jeep into the deep Carolina Bays region of the two states as part of 'The Parkways Projects.' Where the two states conjoin. It is not a place of ease, no matter your constitution nor your mindset. It’s an eerie place of separatist belonging, for I felt I belonged there by birthright but was excluded by today's currents.

In these Carolina Bays, it is the crows which sound the back and forth of present participles versus past tense. These murders of crows were out in abundance on this trip into the swamp basins of the Carolina Bays crossings between Little Pee Dee State Park (South Carolina) and one of the newest North Carolina State Parks, Lumber River.

It's an old bridge but with a new and shiny guard rail assembly. Nothing like an allegory there, for we are not about that, no, especially not in Carolina Bay territory. Lumbees. Witches. Panthers—or paints. Others. Neithers. Amalgams from the in-betweens. Dark, light, good, evil, all exist within these swamps. Along with the fish curiously trying to consider the humans above the surface of their waters. I walked this bridge four times, shooting each time something caught my eye.

There’s no stopping the sounds, the caws, the currents and eddies, the blackwater abundance in shallow layers hiding just what we do not wish to know is under there. But things which the hackles tell us are under there. Like today. Then I made my way into the swamp to shoot it from this vantage point.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

A Spectacular Sunday #Stunday to all here at #Bluesky🦋 Here's a post from the edge of post-minimalism ⚪ #EastCoastKin #ArtYear 🧩 "Pan's brief spell of Eternity," a #digitalcollage from the Hybrid series of works #altphotography #abstract #JuneSea #dream There's more narrative in the ALTtext! 🎭 ⬇️

"Pan's brief eternity" The colors are largely a duotone composition of a slightly reddish sepia & cream color. To finish off the piece with a little more edge to it, a deep golden ocher is introduced as a large translucent pane over the model’s shoulder and a small rectangle, a reflection from underneath her chin. Pan is very pale and ghostlike and stares at you intently from their only visible eye, the other deep within shadows. Their pupil is heavily dilated, as Pan was known for excess, often killing many human trespassers who entered their realm. Pan was neither male nor female, but a shape-shifter.

You’re under the gaze of the trickster god of old, one who existed in almost every mythic pantheon of the gods around the world. They are not amused by your presence but highly intrigued in your having the courage to drop in for a visit. You’re likely to never see home again, but to be lured by this feral creature of mists into an eternity all too brief for the gods, but very long and drawn out for humans.

I’ve posted many words on this work over the years, largely about the method, mode and manner of the art I do inside Photoshop to create them. Here’s a few more, for there’s a story inside the story of Pan, for all riddlers are such folk.

Since 1996, when I started building my first digital collages inside Photoshop by using the more painterly methods of additive/reductive, I started referring to the final images as digital composite builds. I'm also emulating older photographic methods and techniques. Like Ansel Adams employed long ago. After two decades he’d forgotten his method’s complexities, and thanks to not keeping recipes (at times losing those he did record) coupled with the advent of chemical changes in modern photography, Ansel never could return to those former methods he’d hoped to recover. The photos he made and developed were (after that time) less dense in tonalities, the blacks less rich & velvety.

This made me realize recipes are good.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

#Photography #TheParkwaysProjects #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Nature #scape The interior of the original Rangers' Cabin Office at Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee. Never let it be said that the love of a person for what they believe in can not transcend the most grievous of barriers. 🧵 ⬇️4ALT below...

Here is the interior of a very small stone cabin crafted by young men in training as members of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's. It is a very skilled build, with both the greyish-golden native stone and the deep reddish browns of old wooden rafters, beams and planks hand cut and crafted, the wood probably made of spruce. It's a beautiful remnant of an era fading from view in many parts of America. An old vintage mountain rescue sled, made of steel and oak, hangs horizontally, high above the floor. This is a room steeped in lore.

It is in this place of being we may find our anchor beneath the waters which might drown us should we spill over into the deep.

We are witnessing the Sun's existence. Between two chairs.

I can only consider, what was that difference between the origin of these chairs? One a standard ladderback, the other created by an artisan crafter plying a skilled sense of local aesthetic. Both were most likely crafted by mountain hands.

It's of no matter, really, save for just igniting wonder in the mind of the viewer as the entire building, exterior and interior, stem from the old ways. They derive from the past the skills the people of Appalachia knew, and carried in their being all through the course of their lives. That chair on the left, made by hands long ago buried in a grave marked by their surviving family members in hopes that their descendants would remember them.

Such is the care some are willing to devote to places where we as visitors might go to reconnoiter, to reclaim our sense of self. It is a certain clarity which has been bequeathed to us by a living being, a young mind who wishes to share an interpretation of just what might have been, oh so long ago.

A mighty vote of thanks to Ranger Josh Powell at Big Ridge, for your efforts to maintain, curate and equip this small but well-preserved slice of history.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

There's not much to an angle of view. Or is there? For here we see daylight as so many of he mountain dwellers would love to have seen more often. Yet here they be windows, affordable, less than dragons at the boundaries of maps of ancient antiquity.

It is in this place of being we may find our anchor beneath the waters which might drown us should we spill over into the deep./

We are witnessing the Sun's existence. Between two chairs.

I can only consider, what is that difference between these chairs? One a standard ladderback, one crafted by mountain hands. The latter may be made by a person only 45 years old today; perhaps 30 years of age.

It's of no matter as they stem from the old, they derive from the past the skills they have learned. Then again, that chair on the left may just be made by hands long ago buried and marked for their descendants.

Such is the care some are willing to give to places where we might go to reconnoiter, to reclaim our sense of self. It is a certain clarity which has been bequeathed to us by a living being, a young mind who wishes to share an interpretation of just what might have been, oh so long ago.

A mighty vote of thanks to Ranger Josh Powell at Big Ridge.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

#Stunday #Photography #Nature #TheParkwaysProjects The interior of the Rangers' Cabin Office at Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee, scene #1. Never let it be said that the love of a person for what they believe in can not transcend the most grievous of barriers.

Ranger Josh Powell is a unique person. He has a vision. He has a grasp of the past.

You are viewing his art, his vision, both into the Past and onto our Futures in these lean years to come. We are born from memories, all of us. Some of us know from where our memories come; we are the lucky ones, for we have a heritage of words from those who came before us.

Josh has prepared this cabin, which rests to this day in the same place it always resided, at the entry to Big Ridge State park in Tennessee. The only anomalies are due to the vagaries of time, for they are brochures, maps and promotionals from years past, angling up from the depths of their own history, and they are then perfectly placed for all to see, to feel, to observe. We are witnessing Time's passage.

There is power in this little cabin. In this little cabin resides love for one's profession, and for all those whose professions preceded you.

Look closely at the lay of these stones. Realize they stem from the tired fingers and sore forearms of 20 year old men soon to be called to service on December 8th, 1941. You are standing upon history. You are hovering above souls long buried.

You are in a finger's grasp of knowing those who came before you and gave their lives for the freedoms you once had.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

You saw Brigadoon #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #Minimalism #ArtYear #EastCoastKin 1989 in Seattle—shooting an album cover, when I saw this incredible bridge wall across from us. Shot with an old Minolta, my negative today is lean. You saw the Whole of the Moon 💙🦉🌙 4️⃣ALT⬇️

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

🦉A Victorian sunset #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #BlueSkyArtShow #Vibrant From Jan 26th 2019, the golden light you see is above Santee State Park, hearkening back to a Colonial era event in which a large earthwork still exists. I'm 1.3 miles away.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

🦉 Station's Breach #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #Travel #Mountains #RockinTuesday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin "Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. ≈ Annie Leibovitz ⬇️4ALT

Water laden gray clouds scroll over a pale and overcast silver sky.

It had been 50 years since my family had embarked on the third year of traveling up both parkways. In 1969, we were pulling a new Coleman Pop-up camper towed by our aging 1963 Chevrolet Impala, with no air conditioning. That was the reason for the Coleman, for in 1968 we discovered just what brakes could not withstand barreling down the mountain grades with too much weight behind us.

During both years, my Mom, who was ostensibly the navigator on such trips, was busy journaling. I'm thankful she wrote in longhand, for she was an excellent shorthand stenographer. That would have been nearly criminal as I doubt I could find a shorthand reader these days. Due to those journals in 1968 and 1969, I was able to follow the exact same route, stop in the same National Park campgrounds, for both Parkways were the first two such National Parks in America, and even in seven cases she wrote down the campsite number as well. I stayed overnight in five of them in August 2019.

I do have a thing for ritual, revisiting that which can never really be regained, or even really be understood. But we can try. For the Appalachians were my havens. It was the days when even on faraway junkets, we were allowed to run free, explore thickets of mountain laurel, follow bears, wander about while the parentals were doing siesta time, for after all, the purpose was to do as we all pleased.

There's far more to this story, and that's going to be the challenge as it progresses, for I have many folders of shots I never intended to take. Then images I had planned but turned out to become something else, for 50 years is a short time for trees, while a long time for us. The first thing I noticed was the old vistas had often disappeared. Although it's a National scenic parkway and modern practices of allowing the flora to do as Nature intended has resulted in a lot of 40 to 50 year growth at overlooks built between 1933 to 1948.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Standard Issue Heavy Metal #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #Camping #MinimalistMonday #ArtYear #EastCoastKin A classic Campground Grill, the utmost of minimal but functional design. “To me photography functions as a fossilization of time.” Hiroshi Sugimoto ⬇️4ALT

"What you need, above all else, is a love for your subject, whatever it is. You've got to be so deeply in love with your subject that when curve balls are thrown, when hurdles are put in place, you've got the energy to overcome them." ≈ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The simplest palette of natural colors explodes at your feet. Orange clay, pale grayish-yellow spagnum mosses, silver gray twigs, deep charcoal grays and blacks, vestiges of a fire sprinkled with various tones of winter's leaves.

This grill has not been used in some time.

"Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself." ≈ Annie Leibovitz

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Indefinitely Tabled #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #Photography #Landscape #ArtYear #EastCoastKin #MountainMonday A Skyline Drive Parkway picnic area lost to Time in a deep Appalachian Mountains fog.

A misty mountain scene of an unpeopled picnic ground in a late August day in 2019. Cold, damp, and foggy up on the Skyline Drive Parkway in Northern Virginia. The colors echo the environment, brilliant green mosses reflecting their color onto the soaked bark of the trees, with the moisture darkened 1940's vintage Civilian Conservation Corps Picnic tables and the ubiquitous heavy 1943 vintage Campground Grills installed during the WPA era.

Mists abound with ghosts...

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

“Why is patience so important?" "Because it makes us pay attention.” ≈ Paulo Coelho The standing stone, Mount Mitchell, North Carolina #Photography #ArtYear #Landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwaysProjects

A rather large flat-topped boulder stands on a promontory point near the top of Mount Mitchell. It's about 14 feet wide and around 9 feet deep. Mostly darker brown and dark gray tones with a section of pale tan and reddish ochre hues. It's about 4 feet above the ground to the top of the boulder. And over the years, it's probably hosted over about 11 million persons standing atop it since 1933. Simply to have their photo made.

From Wkipedia, for this is interesting:
“Appalachian Mountains and the highest peak in mainland North America east of the Mississippi River. It is located in Yancey County, North Carolina in the Black Mountain subrange of the Appalachians about 19 miles northeast of Asheville. It’s within Mount Mitchell State Park and surrounded by the Pisgah National Forest. Mount Mitchell's elevation is 6,684 feet above sea level.

The peak is the highest mountain in the United States east of the Mississippi River and the highest in all of eastern North America.

The Cherokee people, who long occupied this area as part of their homeland, called the mountain Attakulla. It was later named after Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who first explored the Black Mountain region in 1835. He determined that the height of the range exceeded by several hundred feet that of Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

Elisha Mitchell fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls in 1857, having returned to verify his earlier measurements, which had been challenged by state senator Thomas Clingman, a former student of Mitchell's. Clingman's favorite for the highest peak was "Smoky Dome," now Kuwohi.

Mitchell was originally buried in Asheville, but was reinterred in a tomb on the mountain in 1858. In 1881–82 the U.S. Geological Survey upheld Mitchell's measurements and officially named his peak Mt. Mitchell. At 6,684 feet high, Mt. Mitchell is the highest point east of the Mississippi River.”

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

🌲🦉🌙 As soon as I laid eyes upon this image, I saw the moss enveloping all of the tree trunks, even the smaller ones in the foreground. It was then I noticed the curve of the trail, the pitch, then the limbs, all relatively close to each other & that nearly 90º angle as they sprout from the trunk ☁️🪲

🦞 This is the high resolution image scan on file at Clemson University's Open Park Networks. It's a black & white image of a relatively fresh cutting back of forest understory brush near the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell. The understory is even more broad trimmed back today as I'm almost certain this is the trailhead for four of the most popular, and steep, highest cited points on the Appalachian Trail.

Today, at least 30 years sense I think this photograph was made, possibly as much as 50 years ago, much of the topsoil has worn away down to rocky & shallow six inch to 14 inch deep trail.

The Blacks Beyond 6000, billed these days as "Six Summits in Seven Miles," Black Mountain Crest, South Toe, Deep Gap Trail, Balsam Nature Trail, etc... are all part of the Pisgah National Forest, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Mount Mitchell State Park convergence.

I'm adding a link in the next comment to the Mount Mitchell State Park website, which sadly all trails are still closed as of May10th due to North Carolina not receiving the necessary funds to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Helene, as North Carolina's families, businesses, National & State Forests and many State Roads are still impassable; bridges still being out in many locations as well.

When you get to the bottom you can go back to the top, or start from the top to go helter skelter down down down down...Rock Lobster 🦞

Original Photograph Info:
Open Parks Network (OPN) Clemson University
ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH: Photographer Unknown
TITLE: Trail worn by use
COLLECTIONS: Negatives of Great Smoky Mountains National Park
TOPICS: Trails

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

🦉🪔Trail worn by use; burnished in time #photography #nature #landscapes #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #BlueSkyArtShow #Lines #ArtYear #EastCoastKin 🌲 I'll add the original image below in the comment thread. 🧵⬇️4ALT

Black balsam firs are very odd looking trees, because they are ancient, evolving at higher altitudes. A very dense bark, often covered in green moss & lichen create a display of dark needles & bark set off by brilliant electric green moss, yet this image in black & white & toned sepia by me.

Archival Librarians working very much in their own high tech universe derived from our own past the incremental moments when those who have come & gone long before us in their race to record a world lost to Time, now being recovered by a very skilled & dedicated team of very creative folk.

As soon as I saw this image I noticed first the moss. It looks like it envelopes all of the tree trunks, even the smaller foreground ones. It was then I noticed the curve of the trail, the pitch—then the limbs, all close to each other & the 90º angle as they grow out from the trunk.

I'm pretty sure I know where this trail lies. It's likely near the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell just off the main asphalt trail to the observation structure.

I'll hike down it again soon & see it I can get a read on which part of that trail it is. The info listed by the NPS assigns it within The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mount Mitchell & the Parkway overlap at the place I'm almost certain is this location.

In titling this work, I used the NPS title at front, then "burnished in time" to align or pair with another image soon to be worked up & titled in an inverted way.

The other clue that's evident here seems to be the work of a motorized chopper or trimmer. Not the slingblades, machetes or bush axes of earlier years, which left a more controlled looking cut—but rather the the mangled cuts so indicative of motorized trimmers. Based on that observation I think this to be no earlier than from the late 1960s; more likely 1985 to 1995.

If it is a later photo, then the odds are even better I'm correct on where this original image was made.

The mysteries of the Clemson OPN system are just mind-boggling.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Words between the lines of age #photography #TomOgburn #TheParkwayProjects #BlueSkyArtShow #Lines #ArtYear #EastCoastKin ≈ a nod to Neil Young for the title 🪔 “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” ≈ #JosephCampbell 🌙🦉

A picnic table my family ate at on August 9th 1969, 50 years to the day before this photo was made. It's a 1940 vintage steel tubular legged frame with poplar top & benches. A small leaf, spotted green, yellow & brown on one plank, a red rock from Moab, Utah on another.

"Someone & someone were down by the pond
Looking for something to plant in the lawn
Out in the fields they were turning the soil
I'm sitting here hoping this water will boil

When I look through the window & out on the road
They're bringing me presents & saying hello
Singing words, words between the lines of age
Words, words between the lines of age

If I was a junkman selling you cars
Washing your windows & shining your stars
Thinking your mind was my own in a dream
What would you wonder & how would it seem?

Living in castles a bit at a time
The king started laughing & talking in rhyme
Singing words, words between the lines of age
Words, words between the lines of age"
≈ Neil Young

From posts I made along the way while tracing the journey my family made in 1969, as Neil Young's star was rising. The trace based on Mom's journals she always kept along the way. The images will be divided into 11 correlated sequences of works, each addressing a different facet of the changes I've observed. There are some very different scenarios up there these days & places, almost haunted, brought forward by the entropy & abandoned areas—once large & resplendent picnic grounds.

The thing is, the 5 or 6 interwoven narratives that are still extant, are winnowing away pretty fast along the parkways due to all the funding & infrastructure cuts.

These old picnic tables being pushed up out of the earth are just plain eerie, considering the number of instances this is occurring. I finally learned what’s causing it, after drilling down on it for a week or so last year.

Permafrost changes. Not like in the arctic of course but still around to enough of a degree to do what it’s doing to memories & concrete up there.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

🦉 The Ides of April #TheParkwaysProjects #photography #TomOgburn #scapes #EastCoastKin #ArtYear "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." ≈ William Butler Yeats 🌙

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." ≈ William Butler Yeats

A very Spartan composition of two leaves of different trees, both violently whipped and buffeted by high winds until they detached from their respective limbs to fall beside each other to the asphalt streets of Melrose Heights. A small sprig of deep emerald green weed is tenaciously clinging to the earth inside a crack in the asphalt.

The larger leaf is a pale green, the smaller upper one a pale golden brown. Both were run over by tire treads, both thoroughly flattened and pierced by the smaller, sharper rocks embedded by the long-cured tar.

Life is hard on the streets.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I passed into the deep forest, And the dark night closed me round; The dark spray flung its mist in my eyes, The boughs crashed. ≈ John Peale Bishop ‘A Ballad of the Blue Ridge’ 🦉Elisha #TomOgburn #photography #Stunday #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #TheGreatSmokyMountains #TheBlueRidgeParkway🌙 ⬇️4ALT

One of the very standard historical place marker signs, in August 2019 was bathed in very cold gray mists and camouflaged by lichen-covered fir branches. One could almost walk past it without notice, save for the scratching of he branched on the steel. The sky is a pale silver gray with black border and letterforms raised in the cast steel, with pale ghostly gray-green silhouettes of more firs far in the distance.

Atop Mount Mitchell lies a story. This one is for another day, another format, but currently in the works. Soon to be a substack short, transmitted through the ether here, into #Bluesky.

Stories like his are ones worth delving into, for the entire story of the Parkway lands being acquired by the federal government are deeply human and eloquent within the range of emotional effect upon the peoples of the Appalachians. Mitchell of course died long before the parkways were a dream, and I'm gathering many of these dreams and memories along the way and throughout the lifetime of this project and my own.

Ancient mountains yield ancient stories of geology, of archaeology. Anthropology and genealogy. Always, always fascination of place and time by someone once somewhere amid all those sciences.

"Elisha," from the Parkways Project photographs.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

"We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us." ≈ Ralph Hattersley Double exposure at Mammoth Hot Springs #TomOgburn #DigitalCollage #Hybrids #photography #collage #HumansOfBluesky #EastCoastKin #ArtYear ⬇️4ALT

A collage of old historic National Park Service photographs circa 1935 in Mammoth Hot Springs Yellowstone, where they were training young photographers out West. Another area which was training photographers was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, back East.

The Humans of Bluesky exist on many planes. They stem from many different times. Photography has granted us a way to look into the past of our own existences, for better or worse. In this digital collage made from three different photographs at Mammoth Hot Springs CCC camp, I'm drawing a human long gone from this Earth back into our view.

I'll be telling the story of the young man in these photos, and his compatriot, although it's fairly likely they ever knew each other, or ever met, for his compatriot was a much older man, who was an Appalachian farmer in his forties when he first saw a photographer in the field. It was then he decided to apply to learn to be a CCC photographer. His story is heartwarming, as is his peer's story above.

For as best as I can tell at present, they both survived WWII.

The dynamics of the Four National Parks that make up Great Smoky Mountains National Park & Shenandoah National Park & how an impromptu meeting over drinks & cigars initiated a dream to link the East's two largest National Parks by two scenic parkways in the clouds...it all began here, in two different locations.

The image above is a gold and tan representation of multiple older photographs from the 1930's, representing the dawning of outdoor scenic photography, even though it began as a rather staid process of recording structures. Over time, the new photographers began to learn aesthetics, composition and the eye for the sublime, as only they could see it. For they were of these areas.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

🦉Whittier fire and flood #photography #landscapes #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #smArtist #coastal #sensoryart #contrast 2017, while staying at Lauren’s home in Whittier North Carolina, high above the banks of the French Broad River in more placid times. 🌙 ALTtext⬇️ 🍂

1st Hybrid Landscape Primary piece.

What you are seeing here is a digital composite image, my first hybrid landscape primary work, although at this point it was all digitally crafted from a photograph made in the Town of Whittier, North Carolina. It's an abstracted landscape collage of an old church in gold, charcoal, sienna red & lavender, flooded by the French Broad River.

It’s the first time I actually called something “a primary hybrid piece” rather than a digital composite image. I began the hybrid paintings & hybrid collages in traditional form October 5th 2017 at a small farmstead out side of Norway, South Carolina. By January 2018, I had created 23 collages combined with painting. I was building them as alternate ideas & as “starts” for the first wave of actual hybridized works crossing in & out of analog & digital modes.

On return to Santa Fe December 2019 I was reconsidering the Carolinas as early as 2020. The likeliest locations were to be somewhere between Saluda, Whittier & Black Mountain, North Carolina. Whittier was different however, for I was introduced to it by my niece, a fellow artist & author. It was where she lived for 15 years while working as a Great Smoky Mountains National Park Ranger. Our family was avidly outdoorsy.

Between 2011 & 2023, I metamorphosed from being a drawer & painter to an amalgamated creative. Whether one calls it interdisciplinary spectral media chameleon or post-modernist artist jumping back & forth between traditional & digital arts, I ended up finding out I loved being a shape-shifting creative.

I never really had such a plan. It just happened.

Like the 1980’s film “Altered States,” which brings into play my other great love, which is visual anthropology. There are times I think a plan was in the works, but whether crafted in my mind or rather some acceptance of creative osmosis, I've been able to coast currents which all seem to come back to one land. One locale.

The place of self.

Just being; mere knowing.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

🦉Piazza Wires #photography #landscapes #cityscapes #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Stunday #CharlestonSC #Electric "A rat's nest of wires above our heads," she said, looking up. We both laughed but hey, it made you want to get out from under them right off, indeed. 🌙 ALTtex⬇️

This home.

I used to stand beneath it at times too long. I'm fairly certain it was a duplex. A very old one at that. One day I'll run it down to be sure but I'd bet it dates back to around 1830-40. I always wanted to live in both, but as of present have yet to achieve that bemusement.

It's likely a single-walled construction white clapboard home, just off Colonial Lake & had a deep blue sky behind it once. Like me it changed.

This is a very old home in the Colonial Lake district of the Holy City, called that by most of its wholly-owned subsidiary denizens in a similar manner of obfuscation as one certain Seattle Times curmudgeon & writer, Emmett Watson, wryly named his most successful attempt to keep people away from Seattle that it worked for 37 years straight. I met Watson twice, both times under odd circumstances. I liked him. He reminded me of my Uncle Bill Adams. But that's another microstory for yet another short jab of conversation made here in the etherversal-years of no conversation being allowed to breathe for longer than 55 minutes. Like Jimmy Carter's 55 mile per hour speed castration of lead-footed people in 1977.

I should have made a practice out of shooting the old wires over & above & wrapping around Colonial Lake back when I lived there, before they were mostly all replaced. We think we know beauty.

We really don't notice the beauty of past whispers, glimpses & currents carried which allowed us to speak by a long outmoded cradle phone, to friends far away & crackling in the bell by our ear. Or the warmth or the golden flickering light from the old clear General Electric bulbs when Santee Cooper kicked its turbines on so long ago.

I have to apologize to my old hood for never having realized it until too late.

And then move on to the visual memories of them all.

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?” ≈ Virginia Woolf

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

with the owl doing a fell swoop is going to be art maybe by this fall. Planning a fairly large Hybrid painting of it.

My two very first HO scale slot racers. From 1966. '66 Mustang notchtop versus a '66 Jag XkE. Not 100% sure that was the right designation, and, I think it may have been a 1965 model of the Jag.

This panel was shot to be worked up into a Hybrid painting, blending the photo beside it of me and Dad duking it out Christmas morning!

I swore allegiance to Santa Clause in the wee hours just before light of that December 25th 1966! I'd just unsuccessfully completed the first half of the 5th grade. Mrs. Carson's class, an epic ancient adventure from the dawn of time that was a trial and tribulation to many a 5th Grader.

I survived it however. Shaken, but not stirred.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

🦉At the docks of Lake Greenwood #photography #landscapes #TheParkwaysProjects #TomOgburn #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Stunday Concrete dockwalls & hewn stones hand laid by young men in the years preceding World War II. An ongoing series of words & stories will be about the CCC in The Projects. 🌙 ALTtex⬇️

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

🦉Engineers' craggy dreams of tunnels #TomOgburn #Stunday #EastCoastKin #Landscape #DigitalCollage #Appalachians 🌙 Please do follow #GreatSmokyMountains & #Shenandoah #NationalParks The Blue Ridge & Skyline Drive Parkways. It’ll be interesting & illuminating & I hope helpful to all four NPS sites🏠🧵⬇️

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

🦉A long shadow of a red leaf trapped #TomOgburn #Photography #BlueskyArt #Skyart #BlueskyPhotography #Landscape #EastCoastKin #ArtYear #Bluesky🦋 #ParkwaysProjects —A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 media arenas: A Substack Patreon & Bluesky trio 💙 Please click below to follow the Parkways stories ⬇️🙏🌿

"A long shadow of a red leaf trapped," a raw photo while walking November 11th 2024, six days after the election.

The next to last day I've walked since then, for three days later I learned of Bluesky. A single red leaf has fallen & caught, wind-curled over onto itself in the wide crack of a sidewalk. It's casting a long but frail shadow. The red leaf, left side of screen, stands apart from the grainy gray of the concrete sidewalk poured circa 1972. Not that long ago, probably around the time of another grayer election.

On looking for photographs of documents I've been backing up on my iPhone this year, I found this quickly forgotten sequence of photographs, three groups of which were made before this past election of November 5th, 2024. On the morning of the 6th I walked about 12 miles around & around the neighborhood, sorting out thoughts while recording leaves on the streets & sidewalks. It was more of a way to clear my head. The same pattern followed on November 7th, then the 9th, 10th, 11th & finally the 14th although memory is prodding me that I transferred one sequence of shots from November 17th. On that day I was breaking away from doomscrolling.

There is something about the frailty of leaves, the last gasp of which occurs in the fall as colors evade the reality of dying; when photosynthesis has ended. Soon they become flatter imprints upon the grain of tarmac & pavement. Embossed onto the concrete & sand. As thoughts also inevitably must do.

On finding them again, I realized these recordings mark a ribbon of time consisting of 30 days. Omne trium perfectum failed in a great gasp & collapse. The substrate of concrete, asphalt & sand is a ground for watching flickering wisps of leaves erode away finally into one unobserved instance, the leavings as traceries of their veins along these streets.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

🌙🦉 #TheParkwaysProjects A multi-tiered photo essay to come in three arenas: a Substack/Patreon/Bluesky trio. A sliver of space amid torrents of rain, #TomOgburn #photography #JulienPriceSP #PhotographersOfBlueSky #BlueskyArt #Skyart #photos #camping #EastCoastKin 🦋 #ArtYear #KodakInstamatic 4️⃣ALT⬇️

1963 Impala, 1969 Camper at campsite D16, Julian Price State Park. This Kodak Instamatic photograph is of a car & pop-up camper against a dark olive-black forest made at the start of a rain soaked weekend. It’s why the canvas is sagging, for it was saturated by the time I took this photograph. I was a 13 year old agnostic of two years, formerly Methodist & thoroughly soaked to the skin on a cold August gloaming off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I considered this its baptism—would it welcome me back inside? Before this drenching, I would swear it had no religion.

The cardinal rule was to not touch the inner surface of the canvas. Or the great flood would come. It may seem I have a theme but not by plan. Nor any commandment to the best of my recollection. It’s easy to remember what three full days & nights plus a few extra hours of drenching rains does to the spirit when camping.

1963 Chevrolet Impala. Dark metallic brown. White top, painted, not vinyl.

1969 Coleman pop-up tent camper. A beautiful golden maple brown.

1969 at Julian Price State Park, North Carolina. Campsite D16. I’ve since camped in that site four more times over 54 years of my life. On the last trip to the Parkway in October of 2023 I learned it was slated for retirement due to the narrow pullout space & steep walk down into the campsite.

Due to Fate, fortune & climate change, I still don’t know if D-16 still exists. If no, then a part of myself will not exist. Even under brilliant sunlight, even if 6,000 miles away from this place.

In August 2019, August & October 2023, it rained during, but not throughout my stays there. In 1972 I remember being in this site for a full week. It was only me, the first year of no more family vacations. It did not rain once. I was there two nights in 2019; gone at daybreak. Two nights in 2022. sne night in October 2023.

In all my dreams, I would never have considered this site, this campground, this Parkway to ever become decommissioned.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

To find Sarah Kendzior & read her & you should do both: @sarahkendzior.bsky.social substack.com/@sarahkendzior

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Nest over Estes #TomOgburn #America:Lost&Found #HybridWorks #Photography #BlueskyArt #Skyart #BlueskyPhotography #Landscape #Nature #DigitalCollage #ParkwaysProjects —A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 media arenas: A Substack, Patreon & Bluesky trio 💙 Please click below to follow ⬇️

I've been going to Estes Park for one reason or another since 1979. This is a view from Prospect Mountain, high above the town proper, safe from flooding but not from fire. If I could have figured out a way to live there early on I would have, and in 2004, I almost did. A teaching position opened up at a college back East though, so I left there in August of 2004. I love this town. Resilience stems from Estes, in my imagination.

Windswept pines over a hundred years old cling to the rocky outcroppings of Prospect Mountain. Two of them are framing the town of Estes Park below. Colors are all muted buffs, grays, and browns save for the tree in the foreground and the needles of the tree on the right. Those have deeper, richer greens and the bark is a strong deep reddish brown. MacGregor Ridge is in the far distance, about two miles away as the crow flies.

From my notebooks; a post: "Between a fire just a few years ago which took out much of the historic district of Estes Park, and the recent massive flooding, the high mountain town has experienced much devastation . My best wishes and prayers to all my friends who are there, working to rebuild and to reclaim their land, homes, businesses, and hearts." ≈ to my friends in Estes Park, 2013

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Peace regards the passage of Light #TomOgburn #Skyart #landscape #EastCoastKin 🦋 #ArtYear #Art #photography #BlueskyArt #SouthernGothic #urbex #DigitalCollage #ParkwaysProjects —A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 media arenas: A Substack, Patreon & Bluesky trio 💙 Please click below to follow ⬇️

A photograph of a woman seated, working her fingers together as she pondered a conversation across a room. A room where she was sitting for a scene in which she was to be the personification of Peace, arguing with the personification of War, whom she’d grown up knowing since the dawn of Time.

I began this particular piece about a week after I returned from Colorado early August, 2004. I had taught four classes as an adjunct for two semesters in Charleston, South Carolina. I’d been making art full time by then for just over ten years, after 17 years as an illustrator, graphic designer, then adding advertising and marketing while in Seattle for eight years. On returning to South Carolina from the Northwest in 1998, with a couple of years going back and forth back to Seattle doing album design work for musician friends.

Here’s something I’ve shared before, but now there’s more people reading and likely to be hearing this for the first time. In 1988 I started sharing with friends and peers I’d worked with in commercial art that “I’ll quit when I’m 40.” In hindsight, I’ve always asked myself why I decided to wait. These days, I’d like to go back and yank that idea out of my 34 year-old head. For I should have quit as soon as I realized I was going to quit. I say this as an introduction to something, for we all come to cruxes in our lives. Often more than once.

Sometimes more often than we can imagine.

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The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

A Slow Craze #TomOgburn #photography #landscape #ArtYear #landscapephotography #mobilephotography #EastCoastKin 🦋 #NationalParks #USForestService #shotoniphone The Parkways Projects—A multi-tiered photo essay in 3 media arenas: A Substack, Patreon & Bluesky trio 💙 Please click below to follow ⬇️

Something new from a border region, of something very old. I'm at Walters Dam here, in Tennessee, one of the original TVA Dam Projects. The scene is an old road sign "SLOW," in the immediate foreground. It's probably one of the very first aluminum ready-made signs, possibly from the 1960's. The chrome yellow paint has faded to a very pale butter yellow. The paint has crazed mightily, separating in places a quarter of an inch apart. The old WPA built Walters Power House is in the background. A main electrical array, made of steel trussworks, recedes on the right. Above it all looms the lush green mountainside of the Great Smoky Mountains State Park.

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