The Ozarks got a goodly dose of rain from Tropical Storm Hermine last week, but the weather report for the weekend looked like a bust for waterfall shooting – mostly sunny skies. So I was taken aback when I was awakened by a workman on the roof Saturday morning and found the sky completely overcast. Because it was my birthday, Gina said I could do anything I wanted and she wouldn’t protest, so I headed out for the hills to see if the waterfalls were still running. I drove up to Russellville, turned left onto Highway 7 and pulled over to consult the waterfall guidebook. Bear Skull Falls in northern Johnson County looked doable. I threaded my way along a couple of twisty state highways and then onto a dirt road until I hit the Ozark Highlands Trail. The waterfall was about a mile and half down the trail. It was a nice level hike for about three-quarters of mile and then the trail headed down, down, down to the bottom of the drainage. There wasn’t much photo worthy material until I hit the waterfall, which you can’t miss. It’s right next to the trail.

The waterfall itself is pretty typical of your Ozarks waterfalls. A small creek that’s probably dry 90 percent of the time runs off one of those shaley ledges into a green plunge pool. It’s decently tall, but not a lot of volume. I spent about an hour and a half shooting the thing as the weather switched back and forth between overcast and bald blue sky. I heard a rumble of thunder a couple of times and caught a brief rain shower. By the time I was ready to leave, the sun came out for good and the humidity climbed to about a million percent. The temp was only in the mid-80s and I was barely moving around, but the sweat poured off me like I was fighting malaria. The uphill hike out of there was about as sweaty a thing as I’ve ever experienced.

I visited this waterfall twice in a week, both visits after heavy rains in the area. The first visit came as I was heading back to Little Rock after a grueling weekend working on our summer house in Northwest Arkansas in an effort to get that albatross sold. (Anyone want a great house convenient to I-540 and the north Fayetteville shopping/dining district? Click here and check it out.) The rains hadn’t done anything for the falls. Barely a trickle. I stopped off five days later on a return trip to the money pit. (Really, it’s a great house. I just installed new ceiling fans and light fixtures and the whole interior has a new coat of paint in a neutral color. Click here and check it out.) The waterfall is located off Highway 215 near Cass. Parking is at the High Bank canoe access on the Mulberry River. The Mulberry was blown out of its banks and I hoped that indicated that the side streams were running high, too. The falls had more water than before but it was less than raging.

I’d been to this waterfall before and found it hard to photograph when the leaves were out. It’s 70 feet tall and if you move back far enough to get the whole drop in the photo, the leafy trees block the top of the falls. Oh well, I did the best I could.

It was pretty stormy in the state last weekend, so Abby, Gina and I took a trip on Sunday to check out Falling Water Falls in the Ozark National Forest between Ben Hur and Witts Springs. We also stopped by Six Finger Falls a few miles downstream. I wasn’t feeling very photographically inspired so I don’t have much to show. We had a good time, though. Abby caught a huge terrapin turtle and we saw a little snake, so she got her Bindi the Jungle Girl on a little bit.

Sometimes I’m a stupid, stupid man. When I got up at 5:30 Saturday morning to head up to King’s Bluff Falls north of Russellville, I had it in my head that the temperature was going to be in the 40s and the sun would be out part of the time. (In my defense, I got that from the weather forecast.) I donned my thin silk long underwear and put on my old New Balance running shoes over a pair of heavy wool socks. I also took two fleece jackets and thought I might be overdoing it in the warm clothes department. I was startled to find snow still on the ground when I turned north from Russellville on Highway 7. And when I got to the parking lot at the trail head, it was flat cold and the wind was whipping over the mountaintop. No sun was showing and wouldn’t the whole day. A good day for waterfall shooting, but bad for staying warm. The nice thing about the overcast and the wet ground is that the colors really saturate in the photos.

I love these kinds of signs. I guess there are people in the world who plunge off into the woods without knowing where they are going or that their kids might fall off a cliff. The trail head for the waterfall is also the trail head for the Pedestal Rocks area where pieces of the bluff line separate from the main bluff and form stone towers. I hadn’t gone 20 feet before I discovered the folly of my footwear. These particular running shoes are built to keep your feet cool, complete with a vent in the bottom. Water instantly found its way through that vent and ensured I would have wet feet for the rest of the day. By the way, I only have two pairs of shoes suitable for hiking, both of them are old running shoes. They aren’t a problem in the warmer months, obviously. My goal this week is to find a permanent hiking-footwear solution.

The hike to the falls is a pretty easy downhill glide, especially on snow and slushy ice, but the actual trail was clear for the most part. The trail dumps out on a wide bare shelf of rock on the top of a bluff that ends in a tall drop. The waterfall runs off this shelf and plunges 114 feet without interruption. With all the snow and rain lately, the falls were running pretty well.

I’m taking a class on American environmental history and we’ve been learning about how the American Indians lived in North America before contact with Europeans. So I imagined what a native out hunting in February would be doing out on this bluff in, oh say, 1491. He’d probably be dressed in buckskins and be carrying a wooden bow that fired arrows tipped with stone points. His moccasins would’ve been soaked through from walking in the snow. He’d probably have walked a few miles to get there using only his memory and maybe information from another native who’d been this way before. He couldn’t expect to be warm again soon unless he built a fire with snow-soaked wood. And since there wouldn’t be any reason to think anyone else was around, he’d probably walk over to the bluff edge and pee off the cliff, because that’s the kind of thing dudes do no matter what era they live in. But he’d be able to get a clean shot off the edge because in his way there wouldn’t have been a stone-and-cedar-log fence to keep the city dwellers’ children from falling to their deaths.

Interesting thoughts, but since I couldn’t really do the peeing-off-the-edge thing because I had every reason to believe other people might be around, I pulled out my cellphone, took a picture of the waterfall and sent the photo in a text message to my wife. I then used the phone to take a reading on the built-in GPS, which pinpointed my location to within a few inches using a bunch of robots circling the earth 86,000 miles away.

The way down from the bluff line to the bottom was pretty harrowing. In that area the trail was covered in snow and went straight down into the canyon. No switchbacks to make for a gentle descent.

The trail makes a loop back to the parking lot along the bluff line past several of the pedestal rocks. I though maybe I had missed a turn and ended up in the official Pedestal Rocks area, but I discovered later that area is another mile or so to the east.

The climb out of the canyon warmed me up pretty well, wet feet and all, so that I felt I could make the short drive over to Haw Creek Falls and maybe do the hike to Pam’s Grotto. I’d been to Haw Creek and Pam’s Grotto for the first a couple weeks earlier with my cousin Dale and his wife, Amber, who live in Fort Smith. We had a good hike together, but I didn’t take any photos worth blogging. The creeks were running much better on this trip, though my photos still weren’t really that impressive.

I stole the idea for this shot from a photo I’d seen on Flickr by a guy named Matthew Kennedy. I love the shot but didn’t want to flat out copy him. His shot is has the close rocks in silhouette and I thought I’d try it with a little flash in there. But when I headed down the trail I’d forgotten about my idea and didn’t bring my external flash so i tried it with the little on-camera flash. It wasn’t what I’d imagined but the gist is there.

I think waterfalls make interesting photograph subjects because when the water is blurred with a slow shutter speed you can often see patterns in the falling water that aren’t apparent just looking at them. Some waterfalls make better patterns than others. This waterfall in Pam’s Grotto separates into two distinct and almost equal-sized streams on the way down. It’s just pretty.

The trail into the Grotto follows along the base of a tall bluff that’s popular with rock climbers. On my way in I passed two guys standing on the trail looking up for the third member of their party. They said the third guy was going to rappel down and then they’d climb back up. On the way out I passed them again and the third member was with them. I noticed a strange red streak in his hair and asked him if it was blood. He allowed as how he’d cracked his noggin when he came down the cliff. “It was kind of a tricky rappel,” he said. One of the other guys said, “And he’s supposed to be our expert climber.” I asked him if he needed and help and the other guys said they were just going to make this one climb and then they were going to find a hospital to take him to.

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.

… like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.

I had been to Longpool Falls in Pope County north of Russellville back in January, but I didn’t get any photos worth looking at. So when a huge deluge hit that part of the state on Friday I decided to go back and see it when it had something to show. When I got up at 7:30 a.m. Saturday the rain had made it to Little Rock, but it was still raining in Pope County. I drove through torrential rain all the way there and the rain the didn’t stop. The top photo is a two-frame panorama of Longpool Falls and the ravine downstream.

The rain alternated between a downpour and a torrential downpour with some thunder and lightning thrown in for good measure. The raging waterfall created its own wind. The leaves on several of the trees are blurry because they were whipping in the waterfall wind. I climbed up under a huge rock overhang to wait out the rain but it never stopped. Every now and then I’d venture out in the wind and spray and shoot a few pics until I’d start worrying the camera was getting too wet.

The spray from the waterfall had mud in it. In order to cut down on the light coming into the lens and thereby lengthen the exposures, I had a polarizer stacked onto a neutral density filter screwed to the lens. The first time I wiped off the polarizer I was surprised to see mud streaks on my little towel. It was so dark, I didn’t need the ND filter so I took it off and promptly dropped it, knocking a big chip out of the glass.

This is the creek down below the big waterfall. When I was there in January there was a small waterfall and I was able to jump across the creek. I waded out into the middle to get this shot.

On the way back to Little Rock, I stopped off at Petit Jean State Park to see how the rain was treating the 90-foot-tall Cedar Falls, which is probably the most visited waterfall in the state. It looked like a scene out of the Amazon. The plunge pool was a raging cauldron and spray was rising hundreds of feet in the air.

I caught a lull in the storm and was able to shoot a few pics from high on the canyon rim before another wave of rain came in. It’s about a mile hike down to the bottom of the falls and I didn’t feel like making that trek in the storm.

I did drive around to the other side of the canyon to the scariest overlook in probably the whole country. There’s a small viewing stand with a rickety wooden rail right on the edge of a cliff that’s probably 150 feet high. I carefully positioned my tripod on the outside of the rail and pointed the camera down just as the rain really got going. Right before I snapped this shot a bolt of lighting hit nearby and thunder shook the hills. I hit the shutter and then booked back to the truck in a low crouch to present a lower profile to the lightning. I know the photo sucks, but I’ve got to show it so that I didn’t go onto that death trap for nothing.

The Davies Bridge crosses Cedar Creek above the waterfall and this is a classic scene in Arkansas nature photography. Normally the waterfall as seen under the bridge is little more than trickle.

This is another two-frame pano.

I also shot some video of both waterfalls with my D90.

This past weekend found me making yet another journey to our summer home in Northwest Arkansas to deal with the aftermath of the Epic Ice Storm of 2009. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do any manual labor this time. I just paid a man I hired over the over phone to climb up in our once magnificent shade trees and cut down the hanging limbs. I realize hiring people over the phone to perform work the results of which you won’t see for a week is fraught with hazard but it worked out well this time.

On my way back to Little Rock, I detoured over to the Buffalo River to hike Indian Creek and see Copperhead Falls and Tunnel Cave Falls. The hike is billed as a dangerous one, but I found it less hazardous than the hike to the slot canyon on Shop Creek I took a few weeks ago. Indian Creek is actually the next drainage over from Shop Creek. An ambitious hiker could do both in one day if he started early enough.

The trailhead is at Kyle’s Landing where you follow the Buffalo River Trail a short way until the trail up Indian Creek branches off. Though there are several hiking and horse trails criss-crossing through there, the signage at trail intersections is very good. A sign at the Indian Creek branch warns that the park service doesn’t maintain the trail up Indian Creek. Even so, the trail is pretty beaten out and easy to follow. The trail becomes several trails along the way, but they all lead to the same place. You can’t get lost because you’re in a canyon you can’t get out of without rock-climbing gear. The Epic Ice Storm felled trees across the the trail at several points, but foot traffic has already created new trails around most of those. In two places huge trees that have been down for probably a few years forced me to do my patented limbo moves to get past them. In one spot, the trail follows a narrow ledge about a foot wide where care should be taken so as not to fall. The ledge is only about six feet above the creek bed, so a fall shouldn’t be fatal. The trickiest part is negotiating a tree fallen across the ledge. That’s where the limbo skills come in handy. The canyon itself is like a large slot canyon in many places with bare limestone bedrock in the bottom and a few deep holes similar to what they call tinajas out west.

A creek flows through a cave at the top of the drainage and then drops 31 feet into the middle of the canyon. I thought the waterfall in the above photo was Tunnel Cave Falls until I started writing this post and re-read the description in Tim Ernst’s waterfall guidebook. When I got to the waterfall in the picture, I stopped and took my photos and didn’t notice the actual cave until I turned around to look back downstream. Up above me a few yards down was the cave and there wasn’t any water running out of it. Still thinking the waterfall that was actually running was Tunnel Cave Falls, I thought to myself, “I wonder why Tim didn’t mention this other cave in the guidebook.” That’ll teach me to read the guidebook descriptions a little better.

You can continue up the canyon beyond the waterfall in the picture. You have to do about 10 feet of minor rock climbing to continue. A piece of string hangs down from a sapling to make the climb easier. But the hike had taken me longer than I thought it would and I had to turn back in order to make it out before dark. Besides, I didn’t like the looks of that length of string. However, while I was there, some hikers came down from above and the string didn’t give them any problems.

The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.

Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.

I made it to the falls and they were spectacular, but I had seen many pictures of them and knew what to expect. I stopped for a minute and then booked it on around and began the shin-busting hike up the creek bed. There’s a great trail to the falls, but up above didn’t appear to be heavily traveled.

I had checked the weather when the alarm went off at 5 a.m. and was surprised to find the temp in the lower 30s with an expected high of 40. For some reason I was expecting the mercury to climb to 50, so I didn’t really pack for the cold. I stopped at Wal-Mart in Springdale to get some long john pants, but they were sold out. One of the associates said most people were buying thermal pajama bottoms instead, so that’s what I got. It was foggy and overcast, good waterfall shooting conditions. In the higher elevations the fog had frozen on the trees.

Above the waterfall I found myself in a real canyon, no way to climb out, and the stream bed was choked with debris from the recent Epic Ice Storm of 2009. It was so cold I didn’t even want to unlimber my camera gear to shoot some of the scenic little cascades. I just wanted to get to the slot canyon and worry about taking pictures on my way back. It’s a beautiful place. Just about everything is covered in soft green moss. One little slope was strewn with small boulders all fuzzed over. It looked like a scene out of the Lord Of The Rings. In some places there were runs of unobstructed limestone that offered easy walking except it was covered in that fine limestone dust that gets extremely slippery when wet. You could use that stuff as some kind of industrial strength lubricant, I bet.

I was about halfway there when I tried walking along a huge downed tree. The bark was rotting and slick so I though better about continuing that route. I squatted down and let my feet slip off the log to the ground and in the process banged my tailbone on the log. My butt only dropped about two inches, but it must have hit just the right spot because I almost went down to my knees from the pain. (It still hurts as I write this 15 hours later.)

Eventually I got to where I could catch little glimpses of water jumping over rocks ahead, but it was troubling because they looked to be much higher up than I was. And then I was there, the bottom of the slot. But the walls were so close and steep, I couldn’t go any farther without wading in the creek. The bottom of the slot looked like the end of one of those big water slides at a water park. The flow came twisting out of nowhere and ended in a long pool. I couldn’t even see upstream past the first curve. I stood there for 30 minutes trying to figure out a way to go farther along, but the sides where too steep and I didn’t want to get wet or risk my camera gear. From where I was I couldn’t even get a decent shot of the outlet of the slot.

So I headed back down. On the way back I stopped in a few places for some pictures, but I passed several nice spots by because I just didn’t want to fool with getting the camera out of the backpack and setting up the tripod. I just wanted to get in the truck and turn the heat on. I know, I’m a wuss.

When I got back to the falls, I saw why all photos of Twin Falls look the same. There are just a couple of places from which to get an unobstructed shot. So I got the cliche shot and headed home.

I set out Saturday for the third weekend in a row looking for some fabulous fall foliage. I failed. In the hope that the leaves down south were still in peak form, I headed down to the Cossatot Falls State Park. As I headed down I-540, I could see the leaves in Northwest Arkansas were about done. I was hoping the foliage would get better the farther south I traveled on Highway 71. I was disappointed. Plus, the area I went to might not be the best for fall color anyway. The area is mostly timber company land planted in pine trees. The little swirly parts in the photo become raging whitewater holes when the river comes blasting through after heavy rains. The river is typically low in the fall. On Saturday, you could have easily waded across without a problem. Cossatot is supposedly an Indian word that means skull crusher. They say this is the most challenging whitewater in Arkansas.

When I was growing up in Texarkana, we used to go up to the falls and swim in the summer. That was way before it was a state park. The holes are body surfable when the water is low. One in particular — it might be the infamous Washing Machine, I don’t really know — has a channel that flows crossways and a scoop at the end that will throw you downstream. (After looking at some pics on the Web, I think the photo above is the Washing Machine.) One time I was swimming there with my Dad (and maybe a friend of mine, I can’t really remember). The water was a touch higher than optimum and I came washing down and made the scoop and the water pinned me to the bottom for a little bit. It kinda scared the crap out of me as I recall. My cousin Dale is a kayaker and he told me that one time he flipped in one of the holes and water pinned him down so good he had to scoot along on his back on the bottom until he washed out.

This whole area is one giant fantastic rock formation from the water action.

I finally located the leaves on my hike back to the truck.

Before I hit the falls, I went over to the visitor center at the Highway 278 bridge. There’s an old low-water bridge below the big highway bridge. I hadn’t been to this spot in probably 20 years. The visitor center wasn’t there then and the road down to the river bed wasn’t nearly as smooth as it is now. The area is full of picnic tables and charcoal grills. You probably even have to pay to camp there now. The old road that went down the river bank was blocked off and turned into a hiking trail.

When I was 15 or 16, my Dad and a couple uncles and a few cousins set off on a float trip in john boats from the Highway 246 bridge down to the Highway 278 (it was state Highway 4 then). The river was a lot higher than we realized. I remember going over the Ed Banks low-water bridge without even noticing and my uncle saying in surprise, “That’s the Ed Banks Bridge.” We beat those boats all to hell. And we skipped the falls section. The sign in the photo made me laugh because there used to be a rope swing in one of the cottonwood trees on the bank. Maybe even the one in the background of the photo.

It wasn’t really a wasted Saturday.