I headed up to the Buffalo National River on Sunday to shoot some fall foliage. Gina elected to stay home and I couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to spend the day doing outdoorsy stuff with me. So I took off alone. The weather forecast earlier in the week called for cloudy with some rain maybe, which would be perfect for viewing and shooting the colorful leaves. It rained Saturday night and was still raining in Little Rock when I left the house at 6 a.m. but by the time I got to Conway the sky was clearing. When I hit Russellville the sky was clear and I knew that I was going to miss all the good light. By the time I got to the Buffalo, the sun was high and harsh. I had originally planned to do the Hawksbill Crag hike, but I bailed on that and decided to just climb to the top of Roark Bluff across from the Steele Creek campground. My photo suffers from the harsh light. You really need a cloudy day after a rain to really get the great colors that nature has painted across the bluff. This was the first time I’d hiked Roark Bluff. It’s dangerous up there. The photo-taking spot is on a little spit of rock that juts out from the main bluffline. It’s a sheer drop on either side. If you fall, you’re going to die.

With the bald skies I knew that if I wanted to get any photos I was going to have to do something different, like go somewhere where the sun wasn’t a factor. I headed over to the Villines farmstead just across the low-water bridge at Ponca to check out the old buildings. The farmstead dates to the 1850s and consists of a cabin and outbuildings that are being restored by the National Park Service. The neat thing is that you can go inside the buildings. Something about this doorknob caught my eye, but I didn’t realize what it was until I got home and looked at the photo. The faceplate is mounted upside down. Normally, the keyhole is below the doorknob. The cabin was built in two parts by two different settlers at two different times and the whole thing looked to be poorly constructed. The doorways and windows are crooked and the floor slopes oddly. I know age accounts for some of that, but age can’t explain doorknobs mounted upside down.

Playing around with some HDR on these interior shots.

The barn at the Villines farmstead. I found it interesting that a big power line now runs through the middle of the Villines property. There’s no way all the folks who lived there over the years, scrabbling a living and struggling with cutting and laying by wood to cook with and heat the place and and boil water to wash their clothes, could’ve imagined that life-saving electricity would one day be mere yards from their back door.

Then I slowly made my way over to Jasper, where I ate lunch with this pirate at the bar of the Ozark Cafe on the town square.

I spent the rest of the afternoon meandering around to the east and south and eventually went through Lurton in southeast Newton County where I came upon the Lurton Community Church. I didn’t get any decent fall foliage pics, but it seemed the leaf color hasn’t actually peaked, so I’ve still got a chance for this year.

The new bridge at Two Rivers Park. I thought black and white captured the moment so nicely.

A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.

Gina tried the in-your-face technique. I don’t have any pictures of Abby’s technique because she was ready to call it quits after the walk across the hot field. She did very little digging.

We took some of our dirt up to the giant water trough to try the wet method of diamond discovery. It worked no better than the dry method. We booked out of there after about 30 minutes. All in all we spent about an hour searching for diamonds.

The next day we hit the Ka-do-ha Indian Village on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. It’s a private museum/tourist trap whose claim to fame is several excavated Indian burial mounds. The holes have these little signs that explain what you’re looking at, except most of the writing on the signs has just about faded away. The bones in the bottom aren’t real. They are facsimiles of the bones that were found. The real bones were supposedly reburied somewhere else.

Ka-do-ha Indian Village is also home to the World’s Biggest Diamond.

It’s been so hot for so long here that 105 degree days are no longer remarkable. A couple weeks ago we decided to hit the coolest spot in the state that’s not inside a building: Blanchard Springs Caverns. Abby referred to it as going into the earth.

The cavern is actually a three level affair with the third level being an underground river or creek. It emerges from the mountain at Blanchard Spring.

We stopped off at Mountain View, folk music capital of the region, to check out the street music and eat supper.

We made our annual trip to Wye Mountain a couple of weeks ago to see the daffodils. Abby’s Mimi was on hand for this year’s trip.

Sometimes Abby, Gina and I jump in the car and head off in some random direction. We ended up in Fordyce on Sunday. Fordyce’s only claim to fame that I know of is that Keith Richards was arrested there in 1975. When we got there we could’ve murdered someone on Main Street and gotten away with it because we were the only souls downtown. It was nice because no one was around to hassle us as we explored the ruins.

I got in some good brick-wall-shooting practice. I wonder why someone would label the burglar alarm in big red letters. It seems to me that you’d want to keep the location of the alarm under wraps so that a burglar wouldn’t destroy it before pillaging your building. Of course it’s about 20 feet up on the wall so maybe it’s safe up there.

Rex’s Liquor looked like a great place to score some Mad Dog 20/20.

Rex also has this great side entrance in case you don’t want anybody out on the street to see you going in.

Southern hospitality.

I did something to this photo I’ve never had the patience to do before successfully. A big guy wire from a phone pole extended from corner to corner totally marring the shot. I removed it using the magical content-aware-fill function in Photoshop CS5. I found an instructional video on on YouTube demonstrating how to do it.

Out behind the Dallas County Museum is a weird garden of signs with nuggets about the area’s history.

Fordyce is evidently proud of its high school sports teams, which have the redbug as the mascot. The redbug is more commonly known as the chigger, a most unpleasant parasite. (Note the sign in the previous picture explaining that Fordyce introduced the state to high school football.) This mural celebrating that first team is inside another building ruin that’s been cleaned up. Murals cover the walls on both sides with scenes of various high school sports, football through the years, basketball, baseball, track and golf. All the murals have the bizarre sea of chiggers rising from the bottom to suck the blood of the athletes.

My buddy Kurt and I hiked Indian Creek in the Buffalo National River a week ago. The creek is home to two waterfalls highlighted in the Tim Ernst Arkansas Waterfalls book: Copperhead Falls (seen above with Kurt posing) and Tunnel Cave Falls, formed by water exiting a cave. The trail begins at the campground at Kyle’s Landing and runs a little over two miles up into a box canyon. It’s a great hike. The park service doesn’t maintain the trail and it gets pretty rough in some places. I wouldn’t recommend it for the weak-ankled.

This was a weird hike photographically for me. I didn’t take many photos. For one thing, I did this hike a couple of years ago and shot a bunch of photos then. For another thing, I usually do these long hikes alone, which leaves me free to screw around and shoot photos that don’t end up being any good. Because I had a companion on this trip, I had other things to do, mainly flapping my gums with Kurt. For some reason I can’t seem to talk and take pictures at the same time. Kurt, however, had his camera out the whole time shooting me and the scenery and handing me his camera so I could shoot him and the scenery together. I didn’t mind. It’s more fun to have somebody along. Finally, Kurt asked me if I was going to take a photo of anything at all. So I snapped out of it and shot a bunch pictures of him in action.

This is my favorite one. Kurt emerging from the pit toilet at Kyle’s Landing with the sunset in the background.

The namesake cave for Tunnel Cave Falls is closed to explorers, but even if it wasn’t off-limits it appears a dicey proposition to enter it with it being 30 feet up a sheer bluff wall. No, I didn’t take a photo of the cave itself. I told you I didn’t do a very good job with the photography. The waterfall was dry, anyway.

I did manage to provide Kurt with a nice profile photo for his Facebook page.

It snowed again on Friday and I went out to Pinnacle Mountain to take some photos of it.

Somehow a bunch of giant bald cypress trees escaped the ax along the Little Maumelle River. Like most of Arkansas, the Pinnacle Mountain area was cut over (probably more than once) in the last 150 years or so. These trees are on Arkansas’ Historic Trees list. From the historic trees website:

Arkansas core-dated 21 Bald Cypress trees in 1985. The trees were dated within ranges of 1531 to 1889, plus or minus 30-50 years. The trees are hollow and are likely to be more than 100 years older than the cores indicate.

I’ve shot two other historic trees, and I keep meaning to begin a quest to visit all of them.

The old Highway 300 bridge.

A couple of weekends ago we set out for the Ozarks to see if we could find some snow still on the ground. We headed north on Highway 7 at Russellville and ended up at Pam’s Grotto to check out the waterfall. The waterfall wasn’t running very well, but the hike was fun. It was Abby’s first real hike in the woods and she did the 1.5 mile round trip like a champ.

The trail ends at the bottom of an undercut bluff. The bluff has sloughed off great slabs of rock and house-sized boulders. Abby got a big kick out of climbing in and amongst the rocks.

Family portrait on the banks of Haw Creek near the trail head.

It was pretty late in the evening when we got finished with the hike, so we headed back down toward Russellville and the Interstate. We stopped off at one of the scenic overlooks to take in the sunset. It was cloudy to the north and clearing to the south and I thought a great sunset might be in the offing. We hung around the overlook until the sun passed the break in the clouds and sunk below the horizon. Nothing great was happening but the rule is to never give up on the sunset until it’s slap dark. I knew Abby and Gina were hungry (and so was I, for that matter) so I decided to pack up my camera and tripod after the sun went out of sight. Big mistake. About five minutes after we left the sky lit up red, orange and pink, maybe the wildest sunset colors I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t find a spot along the highway with a wide view, so we just enjoyed the show as we sound along on twisty Highway 7.

We hit Russellville and ate a forgettable meal at Colton’s and decided to find a motel room and continue our adventure at Mount Magazine over by Fort Smith the next day. We headed up the Interstate to Clarksville and found a motel where it was still 2002. Does anyone still carry an ethernet cable around with them anymore.

The next morning we hit Mount Magazine State Park, home of the highest point in the state. We’d never been there before and we were quite impressed with the park facilities, a nice nature exhibit and a lodge that would fit right in in Aspen. The north side of the mountain still had 3-4 inches of snow from the week before and as we got to the park a heavy, wet snow started.

The snow was very wet and the temperature was above freezing so it was like being in the rain. Gina made the bold suggestion that we hike to the highpoint despite the certainty of getting soaked. So that’s what we did. When we go to the top, Abby and Gina built the highest snowman in Arkansas.

This what the USGS marker looks like without the snowman.

For the second week in a row, and the third time in a month, we took Ol’ Leaky out for some camping action. It rained. Ol’ Leaky, as you might expect, leaked. It wasn’t too bad though. The rain was quite heavy but it didn’t last long. We stayed dry and warm and caught the leaks with a towel and a bucket.

We went to Lake Ouachita State Park on the eastern end of Lake Ouachita, Arkansas’ largest lake. I’d never been to the lake before, so we got to see a new-to-us area. The campground itself was excellent, complete with electric, water and sewer, though we didn’t use the sewer.

Even though we had a dry and extremely hot summer and fall, it didn’t affect the quality of the fall colors. Everywhere we’ve been on our camping trips the color has been pretty good. And it’s lasting longer into the season than I can remember.

Abby and I went for a walk on the lake shore and she went into her Crocodile Hunter mode when she spotted this grasshopper. She picked it up and held it out for the camera while gesturing and remarking on its tickly legs. “He rubs his legs together to make music,” she informed me.

Inside the state park is an exhibit showcasing the Three Sisters Springs. When Hot Springs became popular in the early 20th Century, many small resorts started popping up in the surrounding hills to take advantage of the healing properties of other springs in the region.

The state has built elaborate rock boxes to encase the springs. The original owner of the resort invented different healing properties for each of the springs. Based on the information on the sign, I wouldn’t want to drink any water from spring #1.

The Ouachita Mountains have a fascinating history. In this cut that was made for the dam construction you can see how the ancient seabed was folded and warped as the collision of two continental plates thrust up the mountains. Some say the Ouachitas were once as tall as the Rockies are now. End of geology lesson. Carry on.