12 January 20

With no special occasion for today, I'm choosing to wear a new tie that Beth said I simply must have! (It was on a special sale from Ties.com.) It's a topographic map of a portion of "Camel Hump Knob" in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, just south of Sevierville, TN. It was an interesting challenge for me to match up the details on the tie with official trail maps! The green-colored map shows the contours where Yellow Creek and Big Creek join, which are the boldest lines on my tie. Trivium for today: The earliest known contour map was created in 1774 by Charles Hutton (1737-1823), surveying a Scottish peak called Schiehallion.