Whitehead X-ing, Late Spring 02

We come now to the blog post about Great Island and Rock Island, or the rocky islands marking the upper and lower parts of The Straightaway mentioned in Whitehead X-ing, Late Spring 01. Super important islands these seem to be, the most important within Whitehead Crossing by all present evidence.

First is Great Island, which may become “Rock Island” in the future (with current Rock Island changed to something else). All of this being part of a slowly developing picture, of course. I’m presently calling this Great Island, however, to emphasize its importance within WC/WX. First off, to me it quite obviously marks the very southern tip of Whitehead Crossing/Whitehead X-ing, and is also the much larger of the 2 islands I’m referring to here. The island is roughly cresent shaped, and maybe about 30 yards from tip to tip, and about 10 yards wide. I’ll have to check these dimensions in a future visit (perhaps today!). Besides its size, the other obvious quality of the island is its *rocky* nature: there’s little that *isn’t* rock on the island. If you could count all the rocks out visible to the naked eye, they’d probably number in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps the millions.

There are also some plants on the island, but almost all spring out of a rocky base, as with the below cluster. I’ll have to nail down what type of plants these are later on.

Rather interesting close ups of leaves with water beads. I’d like to take more of these pictures in the future.

The upper end of Great Island, with The Straightaway directly behind it.

Now we go to the opposite side of The Straightaway to Rock Island, a considerably smaller affair than Great Island but similarly chocked full of rocks from end to end. The roughly circular island is about 10 yards in diameter, and is pictured better at the end of this April post (2nd picture from bottom). The below picture is instead taken *from* Rock Island toward the upper end of the Korean Channel, where Green Stream disappears (from this direction) into the rhododendron thickets to the east of Whitehead Crossing’s center.