Riding at South Holston

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We drove to Piney Flats and Elizabethton yesterday to clean the buildings. While at the latter, I saw that the zinnias were blooming but not yet attracting butterflies. Hopefully they will make flowers all summer and I can get some decent photos.
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We left there and went riding on back roads where we had never before been, and wound up at South Holston Dam on the downstream side. The TVA has created some nice recreation areas, including a fairly large island that has a footbridge built to it and a lot of people were using it for fishing and picnicking. We mentally marked it as a future "to do". As we approached the base of the dam, I noticed there were cars driving across the top, so I followed the road and wound up with very pretty vistas on each side of the Escape. On the right (north), was the expanse of blue water known as South Holston Lake, and on the left was a good view downstream, including the small generating facility; we were atop the 285' tall dam. We drove on across to the overlook building which has bathroom facilities and a small picnic area where the road ends. This was not the first time I had seen the dam, but the other time had been from a distance on the lake side.

We drove back across the top, and I snapped a shot of the lake from the car window. I then parked at the flags on the approach side and shot a couple of photos down the face of the dam toward the powerhouse. We then continued to the base of the dam, which was surprising in this day of terror and mischief that we could get so close. In fact, if I were able to climb, there was nothing in the way to stop me from scaling the structure. I made a couple of shots from near the transformer farm looking back at the top—all the time fearing a TVA police officer (deputy US Marshall) would slap cuffs on me and ship me off to Gitmo for "interrogation"—and we then proceeded out of the area the way we came in, but I did stop and get a "looking back" photo of most of the dam's face.

Hopefully, you can tell from the photographs that the South Holston Dam is not much more than a huge pile of boulders, rocks, and gravel. It is called an "earth-and-rockfill" dam and was created for flood control and water recreation; power generation is a secondary use. It is a nice lake, and is heavily used due to its proximity to Bristol, but is not nearly as pretty as is Watauga Lake in Carter County.
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