On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
frosty
We stopped here on our way across the state to St. Augustine. There were a couple of drenching days of rain, and not a lot to see nearby, so we stayed at the campsite (and inside the trailer as a matter of fact) for most of our time here. I got out for a run along the river one morning and that’s the source of the pictures below.
Suwanee River
Suwanee River
Suwanee River
This was Balanced Rock, in 2015 it became Unbalanced Rock.
This explains how the rock lost its balance.
Flood stages. Each band shows high water for a particular year. The highest is 68.10 ft above sea level in 1948. The Suwanee is a free-flowing river here, with no dams or levees upstream.
HinTN
A lesson for our time, DON’T fuck with Mother Nature!
Lovely photos of a seemingly tranquil place.
raven
@HinTN: It reminds me of the “Old Man of the Mountain”
eclare
Wow that is a still river.
Betty Cracker
My uncle lives on the Suwannee in a stilt house built high to accommodate the floods. During one flood some years back, the water was so high that when my uncle went to check on his place via a jon boat, the prop nicked the top of his submerged mailbox. The marks are still on it!
Hoodie
@eclare: Not much of a fall there, the river meanders all over northern Florida. That water mostly comes from the Okefenokee. The St Marys, the other river draining the swamp into the Atlantic at the Florida- Georgia border, is the color of tea from the organic matter in the swamp. From what I’ve heard, ships used to sail up the St Marys to get fresh water before ocean voyages because the tannins in the water helped preserve it.
oatler
@Hoodie:
The Ten Thousand Islands had brown tannin water from mangroves.
eclare
@Hoodie:
Interesting, thanks.
Yutsano
Every time I see still water like that in Florida I always think, “Now count the gators…”
(Sorry Betty!)
Chris
@Yutsano:
Well, my aunt in Jacksonville has noted before that gators can sometimes be found in the golf course near her home, so I can only imagine what it’s like in the less human-inhabited territories.
ETA: I do mean alligators, as in the reptiles, not University of Florida graduates. (My aunt would be far less tolerant of University of Florida graduates).
way2blue
frosty—your last photo is sobering. The Eel River in California has similar markers—showing the immensity of the 1964 flood.
Spanish Moss
Great pictures! Love the Spanish moss.😉