Above is a picture of High Point from January 3rd, 2022, taken from the same vantage point as the initial post’s photo. We don’t tend to get much snow in East Tennessee, so I woke up first thing and drove to the property for fear of it melting by the afternoon!

Below are some pictures from November 2021. One of the things I love about the deciduous trees of Appalachia is the gorgeous color palette of fall!

I had the pleasure one day of seeing a bald eagle on a drive to the property. It was sitting in a neighbor’s field and caused a large crowd to gather. Their natural range barely touches this part of the country, so we don’t get to see them often!

Not too long after the last post, I invited some local cave experts to inspect the many sinkholes around High Point. It’s not yet clear if they can be entered for proper spelunking, but some of them are promising! It’ll require coming back with shovels to clear the way. It’s been great getting to know these people and attending some of their enthusiast meetings on the University of Tennessee campus. The group is called “The Smoky Mountain Grotto”.

Pictures of the two largest sinkholes are shown below.

There have been some minor maintenance and clerical tasks as of late. I had to pay the property taxes, since the land loan doesn’t escrow them. I also had to apply for “Greenbelt” recertification, an incentive program to keep the property covered in trees. This required hiring an arborist to measure and record information about the trees (average sizes, species varieties, obvious signs of disease, etc) and visiting the City-County building to submit my application.

I also had to deal with siding on the mobile home, since it started to fall off. In late fall and early spring we’ve seen a lot more wind than usual. Eventually I intend to get rid of the mobile home, but for the time being my dad and I tacked the siding back in place to prevent further deterioration.

I’ve been doing some research about pond construction, since my hope is to start on that in the next year or so. In particular, I’m concerned about how well the valley can hold water, once a dam is constructed. Since there are so many sinkholes around the property, packing down the existing clay might not cut it. Fortunately, it turns out that you can purchase a liner big enough for a pond this size! They manufacture it in sections and then heat-weld them together onsite. Below is an example of a 5 acre pond with such a liner. My pond would be twice the area and significantly deeper than this example, but the video does a good job of demonstrating the feasibility.

I’ve also decided to change plans on the house location. It would be unfortunate to invest so much money in a pond, only to rarely use it. Instead of building a house at the peak of High Point, I’m going to put it down by the waterline. The back “deck” of the house will itself be a dock on the pond’s edge. That way I’ll get much more use out of the pond and will be able to look at it from inside the house.

That said, I still want to take advantage of the views from the peak by building some type of structure. It would be amazing to build a classic fire lookout tower, but I’m not yet sure how feasible that will be. I’ll investigate that at some point.

I’ll end this post with some more photos of the property, some with and some without snow.

After several months of waiting, the sale of High Point finally closed today, September 2, 2021. This photo was taken from a neighborhood just north of the property. To the right is the western peak, called Buzzard Hill. This serves as one of the edges of the tract. To the left is the eastern peak, called High Point, which is fully within the property line.

The biggest holdup to closing was the land survey, shown here. The property had not transferred in many decades, so a fresh inspection of where each corner exists in the roughly 175 acre tract was needed. As part of this process, we eliminated the dividing line and merged it all into a single parcel by filing a change with the county.

The property is almost entirely wooded. The one exception is a clearing on both sides of the road where a manufactured home sits. Prior to the mobile home, there was a dairy barn in roughly the same location. It unfortunately burned at some point, though other remnants of the farm still stand.

These three structures sit near the road as well, a little to the west of the clearing. They are on a small hill, so they don’t have direct road access. One has to follow the ridge starting at the clearing in order to get to them.

While eventually I’d like to build a permanent home for myself on the property (hopefully at the peak of High Point), I think my first major TODO will be a farm pond. After researching the topic a bit, I think it’s feasible to add a 60’ tall earthen embankment dam on the northwest corner, connecting Buzzard and one of the foothills of High Point. This would create a roughly 10 acre pond with a natural spillway off the northern leg.

I’ll need to get some permits from the state, clear the trees and pack some clay down over the 250’ span. Front to back distance needs to be six times the height with a gentle slope from the apex, meaning almost 400’ in this case. After getting a rather expensive quote from a contractor for building the dam, I realized a better approach might be to do it myself over several weekends. I’ll need to purchase a bobcat, since renting one would be impractical. When I clear the area, I can either keep the logs and use them as trail lining or I can sell them for lumber. In either case, I’ll keep the upturned roots as they make for great underwater structure for fish (demonstrated in this video series).

I will also need to clear some hiking trails. One of those will eventually become a driveway to the permanent residence. For that eventual house, I’ll need to drill a new well, install a new septic system and build a solar farm.

Additionally, I’m considering planting a permaculture food forest, keeping bees and/or chickens and creating a sitting area down by the creek on the eastern portion of the property. It’ll easily be a decade before all of this is done, but I have big plans and I look forward to taking it one step at a time, enjoying the journey as well as the destination.

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