Most people come to Broxton Rocks for the waterfall.
There, Rocky Creek sluices down a sandstone shelf above a yards-wide ravine with craggy cliffs on either side in what is otherwise a pine and wiregrass prairie about 20 miles north of the South Georgia city of Douglas. The next waterfall is at least 150 miles away in any direction.
Erick Brown is the director of stewardship for the Georgia chapter of the Nature Conservancy which manages Broxton Rocks, which exists amid cotton fields and pines planted for profit.
Brown calls it an oasis.
“People have, like, this mental image of the palm trees in the middle of the desert,” Brown said from a spot which, earlier this year, was a prime place to view the waterfall.
“These aren't palm trees, of course, but it's a very different system than everything around it.”
When Hurricane Helene barrelled through the southern and eastern parts of Georgia, it pummeled some 8.9 million acres of forest. While the vast majority of that is commercial timberland, some are like Broxton Rocks: treasured pockets of an older ecology.
For instance, the endangered eastern indigo snake, which typically uses gopher tortoise burrows, shelters here in rock crevices downstream of the waterfall. The state’s only rock-clinging orchid, the greenfly orchid, is here, too. In fact, some 500 to 600 plant species are found at Broxton Rocks.
But now that’s all harder to find. Helene, revved up by climate change and record hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico, toppled more trees than you can count across the creek.
“It's a new world; I'm seeing this for the first time,” Brown said by a jumble of trees and water. “I'm trying to figure out what it means.”
Brown has been working to restore this space since the 1990s. Jim Cottingham’s relationship to Broxton Rocks began long before that.
“I went there as a kid with my parents, my great-grandparents,” said Cottingham, an administrator emeritus at nearby South Georgia State College. “There's a photograph of a great-uncle there, with a group of about six, at the Broxton Rocks probably in 1890.”
Cottingham said back then it was just called Picnic Rock. Or even just “The Rocks.”
Later, SGSC botanist Frankie Snow began cataloging the plant diversity.
“Probably June of 1984, Frankie and I stumbled on to some Elliottia racemosa,” Cottingham said.
The common name for the plant is Georgia plume. It’s a threatened plant endemic to only Coffee and Jeff Davis counties. That’s the sort of thing that put the space on the Nature Conservancy’s radar, imbued it with a sense of larger importance and led the group to change the name.
“Just ‘The Rocks’ wouldn't quite do it,” Cottingham said.
After Helene, Cottingham and Snow came to Broxton Rocks in search of some of their old haunts, such as particular trees they hoped were survivors. They got through to some, but not all of them.
“We didn't didn't get in just because of the obstruction of the trees,” he said, meaning fallen trees littering the ground.
A week or so before Cottingham and Snow attempted their survey, Erick Brown and his Nature Conservancy colleague Steven Cabrera made their own.
“We’re gonna try and make it uphill, but there’s a lot of debris between here and there,” Brown warned at the bottom of the hill.
Brown and Cabrera clambered over trunk after trunk before finding a tree Brown said gives him hope.
“We've got a longleaf pine that we know is well over 200 years old and it looks untouched,” Brown said.
Perched on a patch of rock uphill from the creek, the tree bore the scars of being tapped for turpentine in its middle age. Its size belied its age. It looked like a giant bonsai straining for height.
Brown was pleased.
“You wouldn't even know that a hurricane came through here looking at that,” he said.
Longleaf pine forests once ranged from Louisiana to Virginia. Only about 10% of those forests remain.
The trees Helene stacked like cordwood are slash pines and loblollys planted here years ago by a timber company. But longleaf pines evolved here to endure hurricanes and fire.
In fact, controlled fire is the tool used to sculpt and nurture longleaf forests.
“We say that that longleaf is fire tolerant, but it's not fireproof,” Brown said.
As a standing canopy, these toppled trees had been a longleaf nursery. On the ground, they’re just fuel. Brown worries the next fire could be out of control, and way too hot even for longleaf seedlings.
Jim Cottingham worries the timber on the ground may have crushed slightly older trees.
“The thing we don't know is just how many of the 3- or 4- or 5- or 6-year-old longleaf pines will have been knocked down by the nursery trees,” Cottingham said. “It's hard to see how many of them are going to be spared.”
Brown said 500 years ago none of this would have been a big deal.
“Because you would have tens of thousands of acres that were not hit by a hurricane that were in good natural condition,” Brown said. “But we don't have that.”
There's just this oasis.
“These so-called treasures house things that we don't even know about yet,” Cottingham said. “And there's just so much to be learned and discovered.
Cabrera cares for a swath of old growth longleaf further east on the Altamaha River. Helene destroyed some tree cavities there, formerly used as habitat by threatened red-cockaded woodpeckers.
The storm was strong enough to take the lives of people not far from his home. He and his neighbors were without power for nine days.
“It has been hard to work maybe four or five hours in a day and then do what you can, go back home while you still have light because there's no electricity,” Cabrera said. for example. “Balancing your work and home balance during a disaster like this can be challenging.”
But, Cabrera said, the work is necessary.
“When an event like this happens, you know, where do those rare and threatened species go?”
Cabrera said he’s hopeful the birds he’s seen still flying through the remaining tree stands will nest in the new cavities being installed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
After over 30 years of hard work, Erick Brown had been close to releasing red-cockaded woodpeckers at Broxton Rocks, too. He said Hurricane Helene set that goal back by at least another 30 years.
