Discovery & FSL explore Héen Latinee
For experienced backcountry navigators, Bessie Creek trail offers a ‘backdoor’ into the Cowee-Davies watershed, home of a recently designated Experimental Forest, managed by researchers from USFS’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory. Lead Scientist for the Héen Latinee, Rick Edwards, wanted to see a Landmark Tree stand we established on Cowee Creek in 1997. On March 24th, 2011, with Koren Bosworth and Discovery naturalist Kevin O’Malley, we snowshoed in through the saddle on the Bessie trail.
Sample spread from my 13 page journal for this mostly off-trail winter adventure.
This journal was written a few years before Rick acquired high-resolution LiDAR elevation models, and detailed orthophotography from the same vendors Koren, Cathy Pohl and I used for the Borough-wide wetland surveys in 2014. That would ultimately enable Rick to map features such as the bench peatlands described here, demonstrating that they developed on early Holocene marine terraces when sea level was hundreds of feet higher.
Lacking such resources in 2011, I used more ‘old-school’ cartographic aides, such as the stereogram of Bessie saddle in the sample spread above.
