Our Life at Corinth Recreation area

 

      Well, we are still here in Alabama!  Our time is drawing to a close here at the camp ground and we wanted to update everyone with what we have been doing.  I'll start off by saying that this has been a very pleasant experience with numerous blessings.  We have developed a close friendship with our coworkers here at Corinth.

No that is not one of them, that is one of the permanent residents.

Yeah, that's them!  Ovid and Peggy after church one Sunday morning.  These people have made being a coworker and Christian as much fun and as rewarding as you could ever imagine.  They have made us better people.  We will truly miss them.
  On a different note,  we had a trip down to Birmingham in early September looking for some clothes for Stephanie.  While there we ran across a Whole Foods Market' and decided to go in and grab a few things.  What to our wondering eyes should appear but a bin full of fresh 'Hatch Green Chile'.  The purpose of our trip suddenly shifted.  We started bagging green chiles like they were giving them away.  With a quick stop for Sushi lunch we were heading home to start roasting our little jewels.

After roasting and packing our chiles away and rearranging our freezer, we decided we could fit more chile in the freezer.  So, a week later, back to Birmingham for more chile shopping.  It has been fantastic to have a taste of home.  If were careful the chile might hold out till we get back to Las Cruces in December, but I doubt it.

 

We finally got to take the hike we had been planning across our camp ground.  The hike is only a total of just under 2 miles roundtrip and crosses from our camp ground loop over to the primitive camp area and then on to the old closed camp loop.  Along the way we were looking for the reported rock wall with the names of both Union and Confederate soldiers etched into it. 

Dogs taking a break near lake on our hike

View of lake 1/4 of the way into hike

 

We finally found the etching below in a small protected section of the rock wall.  I really don't know if this is legit or the results of some kids playing but it was interesting.  The actual names which were etched into the rock were in a less protected area of the wall and very worn and faded.

 



 

 As I wrote in a previous post, the camp ground was originally built in the 1940's and remained a small camp ground for many years.  The camp ground has been run by the US forest Service, Corp of Engineers, Cradle of Forestry and now a concessionaire.  About 10 years ago they closed the campground while they invested in installing full hook ups to every site.  In the process they closed the original camping and swimming areas and built 2 new camp loops and a new day use area with a large pavilion and swim beach.  They also built a nice boat ramp.  The lake, as I have said before, was constructed for the purpose of supplying the water necessary to power the hydroelectric plant.  As such, when we arrived here at Corinth, the water level was very high.  During the course of the summer and early fall, Alabama Power has been drawing the lake down to the point where we closed the swim area after Labor Day weekend. 

Swim beach extends out to the buoys leaving no room to swim



 We had a real Alabama Storm come through on Monday night 13 Oct. into Tuesday morning.  The weather service kept warning everyone about how powerful the storm could be and they were right.  While there were no tornados in our area we did sustain straight line winds which coupled with up to 6 inches of rain in some places caused quite a bit of debris on our roads and camp sites.  We also had 2 large trees fall over inside the camp loop and large tree branch snap out a tree next to the road.  We spent long hours on Tuesday and Wednesday trying to clean everything up so we could be ready for campers over the weekend.

Bobby (on the right) putting the final cut on a tree

 

Bobby just escaping the falling tree

All the effort was worth it as we now have 35 campers in our camp ground enjoying the cool temperatures and pretty fall colors.