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  Hopefully you had a chance to get outside this past week and enjoy the warmth and beauty of this spring-like weather. Here on the lake and in the classroom, training continues for the coming season. Outside, subtle changes are happening. Flower buds are swelling on the Oconee Bells; male catkins on tag alders are…

February Firsts Mild air temperatures—the first of 2026—stopped by for a brief visit during this second half of February, and nature is celebrating! First bloom (for me) is a single, hot pink phlox flower on a ditch bank, closely followed by fat yellow buds unfolding on neighborhood daffodils. Red maples show off their first blush…

    At Jocassee Lake Tours, our guides train year-round to give you the very best experience possible on Lake Jocassee. Most of that training focuses on the wonders of the Jocassee Gorges so we can share them with you. But some of it focuses on you. This week, 13 of our guides completed certification…

Friday On a lazy afternoon at the Devils Fork boat ramp on Lake Jocassee, there’s not a lot of action. No geese, no loons in sight, no fishermen around but for a couple trying their luck from shore. The park is on fire today: a controlled burn to eliminate the massive amount of woody fuel…

There are things that can only be seen in winter, and there are things that can only be seen in the mind’s eye. The bare branches of the oak and poplar allow glimpses of the tall waterfalls and cascades tumbling down the Whitewater River Gorge. Bundled up against the cold, we’re idling in the boat…

February For the southern hemisphere, February is a sultry, sticky month, but on our side of the equator February is third base on the way to spring. For all twenty-eight days, nights grow incrementally shorter, buds on trees and shrubs grow incrementally fatter, sun creeps incrementally higher in the sky, birds and butterflies feel that…

  Ice storm bird inventory report from the Deep Woods Bird Porch. You’ll notice I did not say bird ‘yard’. Our porch, covered in feeders of one kind and another, is our ‘bird yard’. That’s because we don’t have a yard. We live in the woods, where little light penetrates, and thus does not attract…

Ice. Snow. Bitter Cold.   The forecast could have been a meme, but being hit by a storm of ICE is no joking matter. After the deepest dark of last Saturday’s midnight, sleet pelted from the heavens, turned to rain, froze to hard cold ICE on every twig of every tree, every tree, foreign and…

As I write this tonight, the focus is on the winter storm forecasted to hit our area this weekend. Most people seem to be taking it seriously and preparing as much as possible, as evidenced by the long lines everywhere. Meanwhile, back in the Jocassee Gorges, I wonder…does wildlife sense a storm is coming? Possibly….

Seeking Resilience What will our trees look like by the next edition of the Blue Wall Weekly? Our favorite Severe Weather Liaison from the SC State Climate Office, Frank Strait, has declared “the worst case scenario” for the base of the Blue Wall in Upstate SC. It will not be pretty. Limbs snapped, trunks snapped,…

    EAGLE COUNT! We do it most every January, assisting Tim Lee from the SCPRT in a nationwide survey of bald eagles. Last year we counted only 3, but we did much better this year! As you can see, we count most every bird we see along the way. (We don’t see them…

Trees ‍Bare-branch winter. Trees take on personality not noticed behind the screen of summer green. Consider, for example, tulip poplar, a neat, somewhat prim tree who spends life as a tidy column, orderly limbs thrown sharply heavenward like the praise stance of a church choir. Different, much different, than rangy oak. Oaks are cowboy trees,…