Brought to you by Waterbaron, The Commissar, and Swamp Thing
This portion of the multi-cache (Upstate Ramble) will take you through the Blue Ridge/Piedmont landform regions and four drainage basins. This cache, in combination with its sister caches (Sandhills Slog and Carolina Gold), will highlight the state's water resources from the mountains to the ocean.
Please note the difficulty rating for this cache. You will be required to travel an area that spans South Carolina from the borders of Georgia to North Carolina.
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| SC Landform Regions |
SC Drainage Basins |
As you work through this cache, there is a stop in each of the drainage basins. Each stop supplies you with the coordinates for the next, with a typical cache container at the final stop. Also included in that final cache, there is 1/4 of the information required to find The Mother of All Caches - The Big Kahuna cache hidden near the center of the state. The other 3/4 of The Big Kahuna cache information can be found in the sister caches (Sandhills Slog and Carolina Gold) and in the clue section of The Big Kahuna cache page.
URGENT: You should anticipate that many of the cache stops (intermediate and final) for this state-wide multi-cache will be located in areas that will only be accessible during daylight hours.
You can receive cache credit for locating any of the three (Upstate Ramble, Sandhills Slog, Carolina Gold) caches. However, you will need to find all three caches (Ramble, Slog and Gold) to obtain the required information to locate and receive credit for The Big Kahuna cache. Obviously, this is a long-term project and not a drive-by cache!
Remember to "Cache in, trash out!" and to be sensitive to the environment as you cache.
Background Information
The Blue Ridge landform region of South Carolina contains a small portion of the Appalachian Mountain system which formed over 350 million years ago. This region is characterized by rugged, mountainous terrain containing rock that was formed under tremendous heat and pressure. The adjoining landform region is called the Piedmont , which is French for "foot of the mountains". This region is characterized by steep hills at the Blue Ridge border that become gently rolling hills at its southeast extreme. When the continents of North America and Africa began to separate from Pangaea, the Piedmont , which had been a separate land mass 470 million years ago, remained with North America . Fossils of African life forms can be found in this South Carolina region.
Kovacik, Charles F., and Winberry, John J. South Carolina: The Making of a Landscape. Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
A drainage basin is simply an area of land in which all the water flows, through increasingly larger systems, to a common point. Water that falls in South Carolina generally flows southeast toward the Atlantic Ocean via the rivers within the state's five drainage basins (see image). All the lakes you see on a map of South Carolina were formed by damming the various river systems.