States Sampled: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia
Trees Cored: 60
Total Mileage: ~1750
Total In-Car Hours: ~29
Today was rather uneventful, which is exactly what you want in field work. Uneventful means nothing is going wrong 🙂
Site 5: Bankhead National Forest, Alabama
Alabama and Georgia are easily the most beautiful sites we’ve hit so far. We got to Bankhead around 9 am, and so took our time enjoying the location a bit as well as sampling. It was a bit rainy and cool, but both times stopped raining just as we got out to sample.
Site 6: Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia
It took longer to get here than we thought – lots of windy roads, and the rain didn’t help. There was a little weirdness with sampling – several of the trees were rotted out in the middle (and so yielded too few rings to be worth our trouble), and one of them peed a little on Emily. Apparently this is a thing trees are doing now? Anyway, this site was also beautiful, and had a really thick mat of leaf litter.
To get a jump start on tomorrow, we opted to drive on to Greenville, SC, which has a fairly direct major highway to our sampling site tomorrow (Santee NWR). This means we are once again ahead of time, which is nice. If we can keep getting an extra hour or two in after the second site, our longer days won’t be so terribly long.
Now that we’re three days in, I think the bloom is off the rose, as they say. The driving isn’t as boring as I expected (particularly when the scenery is so nice), but there’s just so damn much of it. And so much more to go. Tomorrow will be nice since we’re at least turning the corner and heading back towards home.
Laci M. Gerhart 
The sites look gorgeous. I’m so impressed with how you and Emily are both doing! Hang in there with the energy levels. And keep the posts coming!