Dams, TVA and otherwise

While I was in North Carolina, Bobby and Melissa took me on a tour of dams in the North Carolina Western region. Two of the dams we visited were erected and operated by Alcoa. The third dam, of the Fontana Dam, was erected and operated by the TVA at a site previously owned by Alcoa. This dam was built as a war measure to ensure a plentiful supply of electricity to Alcoa to produce aluminum for the war effort. It was built during 1942 1943.

On the map of the TVA dams shown to the right, the white spot is the Montana dam. For some reason of the Alcoa dams are also on this map.

If I have my information correct, the Fontana dam is the highest in the TVA system. Interestingly, he is just about as wide at the base as it is high, around 370 feet. The spillway is a through the right-hand side of the cliff. The lake behind the dam is very low due to travel to any in the Western Carolina area.

The rest of the pics on Fontana are here

The Great Smokies

On a recent visit to my daughter in Franklin, North Carolina, she and my son-in-law Bobby took me through The Great Smoky National Park. We started in Cherokee North Carolina and went up the Parkway through the mountains to the state line between Tennessee and North Carolina(see the pic on my profile).

I've had a hard time figuring out what was the most to prominent feature of the Park. After some consideration, I decided as they really are two features. I cannot choose between. This pic really shows both. The first is the seemingly endless ridges and peaks as far as the eye can see. The Park runs northeast to southwest, and we were traveling south east to Northwest. So the greatest number of mountains and ridges were on either side of us. As a child, whenever I drew mountains. I always drew PX in depth to mountains at the top of one showing in the gap between and then more and more and more tops of mountains showing in gaps between mountains. The views in the great Smokies were exactly that.

The second feature is really what the Park is named for. Sometimes the rage after page of mountaintops would just disappear into the horizon. Sometimes, it was as if the top of the mountain was surrounded by a select cloud. But the smoky feature was really that bluing and graying of mountain ridges as the distance got greater until it disappeared altogether. Simply fantastic - see for yourself at this Flickr photo set.