It’s The Shoes

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.