Get Your Sunrise On

My Dad and I went out on our now-traditional hike on the last morning before daylight saving time ends. Only this year the end of DST wasn’t on the weekend of Halloween. I like seeing the sunrise so close to the end of DST because it comes so late in the morning, making it much more likely that I will be able to drag myself out of bed in time to see it. Like last year, we headed up to Petit Jean State Park to catch the dawn breaking from Stout’s Point. Granted, I haven’t seen a lot of sunrises, but this was probably the most spectacular I’ve ever witnessed.

The Old Man was able to tear his eyes away from one of the greatest sights in creation to read a sign on the barrier-free walk on the mountain’s edge. He gets up at some godforsaken hour every day, so a magnificent sunrise is probably old hat for him.

When the sun was up, we made our way over to the trail head for the Cedar Canyon trail, which winds its way through the canyon above Cedar Falls. We jumped over onto another trail and passed the top of the falls on the north side and headed over to Rockhouse Cave. The fall foliage wasn’t nearly as good as it was on last year’s hike. The leaves seem to be way late in turning this year.

This is a hand held HDR I made in my brand new copy of Photoshop CS5. The HDR function works much better in this edition of Photoshop than in the CS3 version.

I’ve been to Rockhouse Cave at least three previous times over the years, but for some reason I never actually went looking for the rock art left by Native Americans eons ago.

The drawings are in pretty decent shape and, unlike rock art I’ve seen in other places, it’s remarkably unmarred by modern graffiti.

Plenty of graffiti from Invasive Americans adorns the walls and rocks in the cave, much of it from the early 20th Century. I bet those Native American paintings are just names and dates, too. “Groog was here in the 19th winter since his birth.”

We hiked back to the truck and drove around to the Bear Cave area to take in the great view there and climb around on the rocks. The photos I took there weren’t much to look at so consider yourself lucky not to be exposed to them.