Pic(k) of the Week: Beneath Stone Mountain

Trees, deciduous and evergreen, stand on a northern bank of Venable Lake, 825 feet (251 meters) beneath the granitic summit of Stone Mountain. As seen from the Cherokee Trail, a five-mile walking trail that circumnavigates the base of the mountain, in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 14 November 2023.

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About

1. Stone Mountain is a quartz-granite monadnock:

   an isolated rock hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or virtually level surrounding plain, typically by surviving erosion. The word 'monadnock' is a Native American term.

   — Wikipedia.




2. The transmission tower of WGTV can be seen at the summit.

   WGTV is a PBS (Public Broadcasting System) member television station licensed to Athens, Georgia, United States, a legacy of the station's early years as a service of the University of Georgia. Owned by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission (technically under the Georgia Board of Regents, along with the University System of Georgia), it is the flagship station of the statewide Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) television network, serving the Atlanta metropolitan area from a transmitter atop Stone Mountain just east of Atlanta.

   — Wikipedia.



3. There are only a few natural lakes in the state of Georgia. Venable Lake, at Stone Mountain Park, is not one of them. Created by submerging a former quarry, it is named for the past owner of the quarry, a segregationist leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. In fact, the summit at Stone Mountain was the site of the re-founding of the Ku Klux Klan,'commemorated' with a cross-burning, on Thanksgiving eve, 1915.

Notwithstanding its historical connection to human atrocities, the physical beauty of Stone Mountain —rising abruptly over exurban-Atlanta and home to sui generis flora— can be quite dramatic. As witnessed, above, on a crisp autumn morning.

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• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of images posted on Saturdays (occasionally, but not today, with a good fermentable as subject).
• Photo 50 of 52, for year 2023. See hi-res version on Flickr: here.
• Commercial reproduction requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.


• Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10 II.
• Lens: Olympus M.40-150mm F4.0-5.6 R
• Settings: 40 mm | 1/160 sec | ISO 100 | ƒ/4.5


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