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.

We had planned to go for a drive in the Buffalo River area Sunday to see the leaves, but Abby got sick and Gina felt a 103 degree fever was not conducive to viewing fall foliage. Gina cut me loose for the afternoon and I headed out by myself.

I drove to Ponca and bought a map of the hiking trails in the western part of the national river park. Parking at the Ponca access to the river, I took off east on the Old River Road Trail, which I had never been on before. The scenery in he Buffalo River bottom is always nice, but the fall foliage seemed to be past peak down there. I bet the trees along the river in the top photo were afire in red and yellow a week ago. That would have made a better picture, of course.

I passed a couple of nice bluffs in the mile or so I traveled on the trail.

The map showed the trail curling back up a draw into some higher terrain and that’s where I wanted to go. Eventually I came out on a huge gravel bar and the trail petered out. If I had studied the map better, I would have noticed the little spur trail that led out along the river before ending. I had missed the fork in the trail and on the way back I discovered why. The sign is way back in the cane and is impossible to see if your headed east, unless you’re walking backward. And the trail fork itself is pretty faint. In addition, I didn’t know the trail split at all so I wasn’t watching for it. Let that be a warning to you if you head that way.

I wasn’t really happy with any of the photos and I think I learned a lesson. I didn’t have much time before dark, and I was intent on covering ground to see as much as possible. Thinking back on it, I could have stopped in any one of dozens of areas and really searched for things to photograph. Instead, I just did drive-bys as I cruised through the woods going nowhere. A day earlier, my Dad and I watched the sunrise from one spot overlooking the Kings River and I got several shots I liked. We didn’t move out of about a 500-square-foot area.

A couple months ago when I went to check out Eagles Nest Falls in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area I found this magnificent view of the Kings River valley. I made a mental note to try to get back there to see the fall foliage at sunrise. I figured this Saturday would be perfect because the switch back to standard time on Sunday would make sunrise come earlier and make it less likely I would be able to get there early enough. (I realize that sunrise happens when it happens and we humans are the ones who put a time to it. But these are mental gymnastics I used to convince myself that rising at 5 a.m. was a good idea.) My dad was in town and he’s always up way too early and he enjoys a good hike, so he was game to go along with my idea.

We got there about 30 minutes before the sun popped over the horizon, but fog covered the valley and hid most of the color in the trees below. That was kind of a bummer, but the scene was still beautiful.

I’ve been meaning to try the Strobist portrait technique of shooting with the sunset as a backdrop and using a flash on the subject. This sunrise presented the opportunity but I didn’t bring any of my flash gear with me so I had to use the pop-up flash on the camera. I got the ambient exposure and then I walked up the flash manually until I got the right exposure on dear old dad. I think the flash was on 1/2 power. I was surprised the pop-up worked so well.

I made this pano shot using the photomerge feature in Photoshop. I don’t have one of those fancy pano tripods so the resulting picture was kinda hinky on the left side and I cropped off about a quarter of the shot. You need to click this one to see it bigger and get the full effect, such as it is.

Click for larger size.