Pic(k) of the Week: Autumn morning on Arabia Lake

Click on the image for a larger, hi-res version (on Flickr).

As I was setting up my tripod, a passing hiker greeted me.
"It's a beautiful day."
"Yes, indeed," I replied.

Arabia Lake: a man-made reservoir on Arabia Mountain, a granite monadnock near the town of Stonecrest in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 6 November 2025.

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Arabia Lake & Davidson-Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area

The former Davidson Quarry, which owned Arabia Mountain in the mid 20th-century, created the lake by damming small Stephenson Creek. In 1972, the Davidson family closed the quarry and donated the land to the county. Concrete and metal remains of a quarry bridge can still be seen on both banks of the lake (visible, in the photo, in the background)

The land is now part of the Davidson-Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area...

...that encompasses natural, cultural, and historical elements to form a cohesive, nationally significant landscape. The area is due east of Atlanta and spans 40,000 acres (16,000 ha) reaching from the historic commercial center of Lithonia to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, including several sites in between, including Arabia Mountain, Panola Mountain, and the historic Flat Rock Community. The National Heritage Area was established in 2006 and is coordinated by the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area Alliance, which includes board members, representatives from the community and local organizations, and staff.

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Miles Davis: Boplicity.
Album: Birth of the Cool
Label: Capitol Records (recorded 1949; released 1957).

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Pic(k) of the Week: Old Grist Mill in early autumn afternoon

Click on the image for a larger, hi-res version (on Flickr).

A restored 19th-century water-powered gristmill in Stone Mountain Park: DeKalb County, Georgia, USA.

Photo taken 10 October 2025.

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About the mill

The mill was originally built in 1867, operating along a creek in Fannin County in north Georgia (near the current town of Ellijay). It fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned.

In 1965, the mill was dismantled and moved to Stone Mountain Park. There, the mill and its milling equipment, including the mill house and millstones, were reassembled. Additionally, a thirteen-foot-diameter wooden overshot water-wheel and a stone millrace were replicated and put in place.
— Scenic USA.
— Stone Mountain Park.

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Photographer's Notebook

The mill is a well-loved spot in the park, easily accessible from the perimeter road. So, it took some time to capture the image without any visitors in the frame. Fortunately, I finished just as a large group of school children arrived.

The entire scene featured deep contrasts between sunlight and shadow. To capture the full range of tones, I took four separate exposures, blending them later during the editing process. Wind gusts were strong, and some of the foliage shows motion blur. C'est la da-guerre-otype!

Per Merriam-Webster, "gristmill" is one word; the park spells it as two.

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Weather Report: American Tango (Vitouš/Zawinul)
Album: Mysterious Traveler (Label: Columbia, 1974)

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Pic(k) of the Week: Mountain Lake (from Arabia Mountain)

The prosaically-named Mountain Lake is a reservoir created during 20th-century quarrying of granite, gneiss, and migmatite on Arabia Mountain, a monadnock in DeKalb County, Georgia, in the southeastern United States.

Here, the lake is seen in mid autumn on 19 October 2024, looking down from a southeastern slope of the mountain. (Some of the rocky outcrop can be seen in the foreground.)

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Pic(k) of the Week: Daybreak over Constitution Lakes

Two small lakes —once excavation pits for an early-20th-century clay-brick manufacturer— now are beautiful bird-and-plant-fecund wetlands of the South River. Here, pictured just after daybreak.

Constitution Lakes Park: DeKalb County (Gresham Park), Georgia, USA. 18 July 2024 (7:35 am EDT).

Constitution Lakes is a 125-acre park operated by DeKalb County, the land purchased for $1.28 million in 2003. Part former brickworks, part wildlife refuge, part hiking trail, part snake pit, and part art exhibit, the land has been transformed by both humans and the flooding South River into an ecological sanctuary smack in the middle of an industrial district.

At the center of the park lie two small lakes that were excavation pits created by the former South River Brick Company [late 19th and early 20th-century] digging out the soft red clay for bricks. The lakes feature countless turtles, crappie, and catfish, along with bass fish: large mouth, small mouth, spotted and striped bass. For bird watchers, you’ll see belted kingfishers, woodpeckers, ducks, blue herons, >[ibises], geese, hawks, and more.

— History Atlanta.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Feed the Ducks

Come feed the little birds,

Show them you care.

And you'll be glad if you do.

Their young ones are hungry

Their nests are so bare.

All it takes is tuppence from you.

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag,

Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag.

The birds in the water are a mother mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and her ducklings. On land, the larger, braver bird (feeding to the right) is a Moscovy duck (Cairina moschata), native to Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. Small wild breeding populations have established themselves in the United States.

The photo is unposed. None of the participants knew they were being photographed.

Avondale Lake: City of Avondale Estates, Georgia, USA. 6 June 2024.

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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: Washington W. King Covered Bridge

A historic covered bridge (open to light vehicular and pedestrian traffic) crosses a narrow channel of Stone Mountain Lake.

Stone Mountain Park: DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 15 November 2023.

The Washington W. King / College Avenue Covered Bridge was designed, engineered, and constructed, in 1891 (at a cost of approximately $2,470), by Washington W. King, the son of a freed slave. It is one of only four remaining structures of the many created and constructed by King. Several members of his extended family were prominent African-American businessmen for decades in multiple Georgia cities.

The covered bridge —using a 'Town Lattice' design that allowed the wooden bridge to flex, expand and contract with the seasons— was built by King in Athens, Georgia, to connect the downtown area with outlying farm lands across the Oconee River.

The bridge served Athens until two severe floods, in 1910 and again in 1963, severely damaged the bridge. Soon thereafter, the covered bridge was replaced with a new concrete and steel crossing, and the original bridge was set aside on the banks of the Oconee River.

In 1965, the Clarke County Commission donated the bridge to the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA). The bridge was partially disassembled and transported sixty miles to Stone Mountain Park, where it was re-assembled and re-installed atop new cement and granite piers. It now connects the park to Indian Island, a picturesque 17-acre island on Stone Mountain Lake.

— Stone Mountain Park.
— Decaturish.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Avondale reverie

Sitting on a bench on the shore of Avondale Lake, a gentlemen enjoyed a quiet summer's Sunday-morning reverie (quiet, other than the honking of Canada geese, off-camera).

City of Avondale Estates, Georgia, USA. 27 August 2023.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Field o'cattails

Field o'cattails.
Riparian autumnal.

Autumn on the marshy edge of Echo Lake —a shallow, 18-acre pond— in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 23 September 2021.

Typha latifolia (broadleaf cattail, bulrush, common bulrush, common cattail, cat-o'-nine-tails, great reedmace, cooper's reed, cumbungi) is a perennial herbaceous plant in the genus Typha. It is found as a native plant species in North and South America, Europe, Eurasia, and Africa. T. latifolia is always found in or near water, growing mostly in freshwater but also in slightly brackish marshes.

— Wikipedia.

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Pic(k) of the Week: The creek at the end of the pond

It looks as if it were a beaver dam...that is, if beavers could move rocks.

Cecilia Creek flows from the southeastern end of Postal Pond, in Legacy Park of Decatur, Georgia, USA. 22 April 2021.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Bullfrog in pond

The bullfrogs (Lithobates catesbeianus) have begun bellowing. It's mating season, in among the water clover, of Postal Pond, in Legacy Park of Decatur, Georgia, USA, on 27 April 2021.

I could hear this loud fellow well before I could see him, well camouflaged as he was. That is, until I used my camera's telephoto lens as a monocular to spot him.

Legacy Park is an in-the-city park. But at 77 acres, it can have an in-the-country feel. Just ignore the occasional bleat of a car horn in the distance.

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• On 29 April 2021, Flickr's editors chose this image as one for inclusion in their Flickr Explore feature.


• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of images posted on Saturdays, and occasionally, but not always (as is the case today), with a good fermentable as the subject.
• Photo 18 of 52, for year 2021. See it on Flickr: here.
• Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10 II.
  • Lens: Olympus M.40-150mm F4.0-5.6 R
  • Settings: 150 mm | 1/160 | ISO 200 | f/5.6
• Commercial reproduction requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.


• For more from YFGF:
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Pic(k) of the Week: The fisherman

The sights of the city cannot be seen, and
Its sounds only faint, as
The fisherman wades.

A great blue heron, shallow in Postal Pond, deep in the woods of Legacy Park, in the city of Decatur, Georgia, USA, on 15 December 2020.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Mist over fen

Almost painterly...

An autumnal tree, in morning mist, on the boggy, boggy banks of Postal Pond.

In Legacy Park, a 77-acre city property in Decatur, Georgia, USA.

Captured on 28 October 2020: a peaceful morning, twenty-four hours before Zeta's local blast.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Pond reeds at sunset

Reeds at sunset, on the banks of Postal Pond, in...

Legacy Park, Decatur, Georgia, USA. 14 October 2020.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Turtle and amberwings, down by the lakeside

Two dragonflies flit dangerously close to a turtle...or, from the turtle's perspective, deliciously close.

• Turtle: northern map turtle (Graptemys geographica)
• Dragonflies: eastern amberwings (Perithemis tenera)

Down by Avondale Lake, in the (small) city of Avondale Estates, Georgia, USA, on 5 June 2020.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Bridge over calm waters

Dredged by folk, 

It's really a pond. 

But still, 

It's chill. 

Avondale Lake.

Wooden trestles span this bridge over calm waters, located in the city of Avondale Estates, Georgia. Photo taken 27 March 2019.

And, by the way ...

The land that makes up present-day Georgia had few natural lakes before European settlement, and most impoundments, formed by beavers and debris dams from high flows, were relatively small. The lack of glacial retreat, land slope, and local geology provided conditions for large and small rivers and streams but not for lakes. The natural water bodies that occur in Georgia are primarily located in the southern part of the state in the Coastal Plain, where sinkhole lakes and isolated wetlands in natural shallow depressions largely fed by rain and shallow groundwater, called Carolina bays, form. Hence, the majority of lakes in Georgia that are now enjoyed for recreational, industrial, municipal, and federal government uses are made by people.

— New Georgia Encyclopedia

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Pic(k) of the Week: Rowboat ruin

Not all, but a vast majority of lakes in Georgia are not naturally formed, but man-made. *

One such of the latter is small Lake Erin, in Henderson Park, of suburban Tucker, Georgia. On 8 March 2016, I played photographer, there.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Technicolor idyll

There, in the background, is what is colloquially known as Postal Pond. Formed from the headwaters of Shoals Creek, the small man-made lake is located in DeKalb County, Georgia, on the former grounds of the Methodist Children's Home —built there in 1877.

The buildings and grounds, including the pond, were sold to the city of Decatur, Georgia, in April 2017. Greenspace is promised for the seventy-seven acres but warning signs of mixed-use development —endemic to the Atlanta-metro area— have citizen groups on high alert.

A generous citizen must have provided the table and chairs. No park authority here. The only thing missing was a packed picnic basket and a couple of beers. Inscribed on the edge of the table: "pack it in; pack it out."

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Pic(k) of the Week: Sunset at Navy Pier

Taken with a cell-phone camera, and yet I like the (inadvertent?) capture of a gull close-by in flight, adding a sense of motion to the setting.

It's sunset on Lake Michigan at the Navy Pier, in Chicago, Illinois, on 12 July 2016.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe: a fresh-water glacial lake divided politically between the states of Nevada and California. At a surface elevation of 6,225 feet, it is the largest high-elevation lake in North America.

At 1,645 feet, Lake Tahoe is the second-deepest lake in North America, and, at 122,160,280 acre-feet, the the 27th largest lake, by volume, in the world. ^*

Water color of cobalt-blue and aquamarine. Clarity pristine, in the face of development. Lake rimmed by the mountains and cliffs of the Sierra Nevada range. Words fail, at least here at YFGF, to describe Tahoe's beauty.

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