… while wondering whatever happened to Blackie Sherrod, who inexplicably doesn’t rate a Wikipedia entry. Life’s been pretty dull since I started my part-time job back in November. But I need to clean out the ol’ notebook so here’s a collection of recent photos and the mind-numbing stories behind them. Up top we have the old post office in Scotland, Ark. A few weeks ago Gina, Abby and I toured lower Van Buren County, new territory for us. The tiny burg of Scotland looked pretty interesting. We’ll have to go back sometime. I was pretty disappointed to later observe a newer, shinier Scotland post office on the main highway.

Earlier that day we came across this interesting sign in the middle of nowhere that explained how to get to places even more far flung.

A couple of random Abby pics. That second one we shot on Leap Day.

Last weekend Zac Lehr and I went out looking for waterfalls. Whiskey Chute Falls was running well but the light was way too harsh and I made a mistake with my lens choice and this HDR failure was all I came home with. Zac made a pretty good shot of the falls, however. But he’s a professional photographer, so it’s expected of him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My Dad and I made our second-annual day-before-the-end-of-daylight-savings-time-sunrise pilgrimage on Saturday. The first annual DBTEODSTP was so successful, we decided to do it again. This year we went to Petit Jean State Park and caught the sunrise from Stout’s Point near the gravesite of Petit Jean herself. Several photographers had already assembled by the time we got there. The sunrise wasn’t all that great photographically, but it was pretty neat to hang out up there with my Dad.

I made one of my famous Sasquatch silhouettes.

After the sun had made it up a little way, we headed down to the trail head for the Seven Hollows Trail. I hiked the Seven Hollows Trail back in about 1995 and things in 2009 were a lot different. The whole area has been clear-cut since I was there last. Now a young pine plantation stands where a mixed deciduous forest once stood. The area must not be in the state park, otherwise it wouldn’t be clear-cut, right? I’ve been informed the area burned in 2000 and what’s there is natural regrowth. I had forgotten about the huge fires they had up there. But it looks like the regrowth is all pine trees. I know pines grow faster than hardwoods, but it looks just like a pine plantation. The trail passes through or crosses several little canyons, hence the name Seven Hollows. The trees in the canyons weren’t harvested for the most part so The trees in the hollows didn’t burn and the fall colors blazed in those areas. We’d had plenty of rain this year, including a three-incher earlier in the week, so the creeks were flowing well through all the hollows.

I caught the wily Bigfoot a couple of times as he frolicked in the forest.

Somewhere beyond mile 3 we came to the Grotto. A pretty cool place up one of the seven hollows. A little waterfall drops into a crystalline pool and the creek flows under a huge overhanging rock ledge. Conditions were not good for photographing waterfalls, but it was so shady down in the Grotto at that time of the day, I was able to get a decently slow shutter speed. But because of the clear blue sky straight above, the water came out a weird blue-violet color. I tried to fix it up a little in Photoshop.

The other big attraction on this trail is a sizable stone arch. I’ve been to Arches National Park in Utah and I believe this Petit Jean arch compares favorably with most of those arches in the grandeur arena. I failed to get a decent picture of the thing. It’s hard to work in a stone arch and fall colors all while the sun is straight overhead providing horrible light. Don’t judge me.

Unfortunately, the rocks in the area are marked up with all kinds of graffiti, including this obnoxious example by some jackass who apparently applied this artwork to the base of the arch in 1965. He helpfully painted “natural bridge” and even included an arrow pointing the way.

If I never accomplish anything else in life I can always say that I was the first person at Cedar Falls in Petit Jean State Park on October 10, 2009. It rained heavily across the Ozarks and Central Arkansas on Thursday night and Friday, so I knew the waterfalls would be running for a few days. The trouble was that Saturday was supposed to dawn with clear skies, and bright sun is no good for waterfall pictures. You need the muted light of cloudy skies to get good photos. I figured if I got out there before the sun got very high, I could do some shooting before things got too bright. Problem number two was that I’d have to go somewhere close by if I was going to be there at sunrise. The only real waterfall close enough for me to get to that early is Cedar Falls. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and got to the trail head a little after 7. And as luck would have it, it stayed cloudy, dark and gloomy all day. The top photo is a panorama made from six blended and merged photos.

But like I said, I was the first one at the falls, no mean feat because Petit Jean is one of the most popular parks in the state. It’s a pretty easy hike to the falls and not long after I got there, a long string of folks began arriving. With all that water and the green trees and slick green moss everywhere, the area has a jungle-like feel. The water had that stained, amber color like you see in the Amazon River. I could easily imagine King Kong showering under the waterfall. Cedar Creek was running much higher than normal and the 90-foot waterfall thundered and sprayed, but it wasn’t running as big as it did back in May. So get ready for a long string of blurry-water pics. (Matt, I’ve got something for you, too.)

Old tires are a popular item to toss into water bodies around here.

The side creeks were also running well off the canyon rim and had some nice waterfalls of their own. My friend Matt told me recently he didn’t really dig the smooth-water shots and requested some stop-action stuff the next time I did the waterfall thing, so I got the above photo for him. I didn’t think about his request while I was at the big waterfall or I would have tried it there. This shot was problematic because there wasn’t enough light to get a really fast shutter speed. I jacked up the ISO and still had to underexpose the shot. And it didn’t really stop the water that well.

This is the previous shot with a longer shutter speed.

The bridge across the creek downstream from the waterfall. As you can see in the earlier picture of the sign, just about every man-made surface (and a lot of the rocks and trees) are covered in graffiti. The handrails of the bridge have dozens of names written on or carved into it.

Self portrait. The wide angle lens distorted me a little. I don’t actually look that wide. At least I think I don’t.

I found myself with a little free time Saturday and since I haven’t gotten a lot of chances to use my ultra-wide-angle lens, I went looking for something to shoot. I eventually ended up at the old bridge over the Maumelle River on an abandoned stretch of Arkansas Highway 300 in Pinnacle Mountain State Park. This bridge is popular with local photographers and rightly so. It’s old and rusty and corroded and interesting.

The Ouachita Trail runs down this short stretch of abandoned highway. The trail runs about 200 miles across the Ouachita Mountains from Pinnacle Mountain State Park near Little Rock to eastern Oklahoma. Hanging around out there gave me the idea to hike the Ouachita Trail. I’d probably have to do it in segments. We’ll see how that idea pans out.

It rained a lot on Tuesday, so to get out of the house, which was driving both of us to madness with Gina out of town for a few days, we went for a drive. Eventually we found ourselves at Harris Brake Lake in Perry County, west of Little Rock. The clearing storms created some cool clouds. For the photo I metered on the clouds and then threw some light on Abby with the pop-up flash.

After the photo session we walked down to the water’s edge so Abby could throw some rocks. She asked if she could put her finger in the water and I nodded. Just before she got her finger wet she looked up and asked, “Are there any sharks in this lake?”