Second Thoughts about the Town Hill Tract, Buchanan State Forest

This photo was taken somewhere along Spade Road, Fulton County, and the hill rising above the quaint little farm in the foreground is Town Hill--for which the Town Hill Tract of the Buchanan State Forest is named.  My guess is that there must have been a family by the name of Town living in this area, because God knows there's not a town to name the hill after.

My visit to this portion of the forest focused almost entirely on Rays Hill, pictured here, but I'm beginning to think that I should have thought bigger.  There are two small mountains within this large tract of public land.  Because I believed in the legend of Clair Winters Road (which turned out to be essentially nonexistent as you near the summit), I focused my excursion entirely on the smaller of the two--Rays Hill.  In doing that, I ended up ignoring the larger--Town Hill--which makes up the eastern wall of the valley of Brush Creek.

The little valley between the two hills has broad, grassy meadows with wildflowers, and butterflies, and many, many deer--as well as their malevolent passengers: ticks.  If you actually come here (which you won't), be sure to tuck your pant legs into your socks and spray yourself down with repellent.  But for all the trackless hassle of bushwhacking through this mess, it's kind of a pretty place, isn't it?  It's the remoteness of it that I can't stop thinking about.  You're guaranteed to have the whole big valley all to your lonesome...which I love.

Brush Creek itself isn't much.  It's small and slow, and unlike most runs, you can't even hear it babbling silently beneath the trees.  But it does have tiny fish darting about in its currents, and jumping across it from weedy bank to weedy bank proved a challenge.

As I said in my last posting about this nearly unknown place, there's nothing about the Town Hill Tract on the Internet.  Nobody comes here except hunters.  There's a lonely sign out by the entrance to this small parking area, and a neglected notice board at the edge of the trees.  There are no trail maps on the notice board because there are essentially no trails--aside from two old farm lanes, one of which is mowed by the forest service for hunters to use, and the other is the overgrown Clair Winters Road.  Ah, but the maps show another road petering out on Town Hill at the south end of the tract.  Despite my earlier claim that there's nothing in this neck of the woods but ticks, I think I've talked myself into coming back here.  And now!  Now the Internet has two blog postings about this supremely solitary place: this one and the one I wrote earlier today.