Journey to Ixtlan

I have a fascination with tunnels. Unfortunately I live in an area that is short on appreciable underground/tunnel locations. I found the next best thing at the largely demolished Laurens Mill in Laurens SC. An underground storage room remained in an area that seems to have been the mechanical section of the building. A boiler and pressure vessels are nearby. The really amazing thing about this room is that there are still metal bits and pieces on the shelves and hanging on the walls. It makes one wonder what other things were bulldozed under in the two adjacent storage rooms. One of them did have one of the original windows, bricked over at some point in the past and now revealed in ruins of the building. Neat stuff...

Looking Out of the Equipment 'Cave' Room

Looking into Equipment 'Cave' Room

Click on an image to see a larger picture

( More Pictures of the Room... )

This weekend I was at a wonderful rural location near Rutherfordton NC. The location was used a farm in the past. A walk through the woods revealed a stone structure that looked like a soil retention wall. This is not unusual on a rural farm. The area above and below the retention wall had "young" trees. These pictures are an interesting agricultural rural 'ruin'.

The puzzle I wish to share is a circle of stones found adjacent to the retention wall. Perhaps three feet across, the stones seem to be too symmetrical to be natural. The moss on the stones seems to eliminate recently placement by the wellness/health facility now on the land. Does anybody have an idea of what the origins of the rural circle may be? More pictures of the retention wall are here on Flickr.

A side question for my fellow photographers. My Samsung L73 struggles maintain a crisp automatic focus during low light conditions. This is frustrating in dusk conditions (like I was shooting in the woods) or in dark houses. The flash helps, but the results can be washed out, robbing the scene of the truer colors. Does anybody have any pointers?



( The retention wall and more pictures of the circle )