We hadn’t been able to get Daisy out since the spring so we took a chance that the late August weekend wouldn’t be sweltering and we were right. Thanks to an weak early afternoon front blowing through. The skies cleared and the sunset was pretty great. Also, it seems that the weekend after the first week of school is a great time to beat the crowds. Only two other campsites were occupied in the loop we stayed in.
We’ve been on a couple of our patented family walkabouts that Abby professes to hate, but actually loves. We wandered around Petit Jean State Park back in February and stopped by the abandoned Carden Bottoms school on the northwest side of Petit Jean Mountain. It’s evidently a popular place for those into abandoned stuff. It does have a few interesting features, like this abused piano.
We’ve been getting some good rain in the late winter and the waterfalls have been pretty spectacular. We hit Glory Hole Falls in mid-March and stopped long enough for a family portrait.
A week before I headed out on a solo trek and stopped by Car Wash Falls on the banks of the Big Piney in northern Johnson County.
An unusually copious rain in western Arkansas a couple weeks ago had me out looking for a good waterfall to visit with my dad. We don’t normally get such a deluge in October around here. Some places got upwards of five inches of rain in the days before our hike. The rainfall map showed Bingham Hollow Falls, a 51-footer in Franklin County north of Ozark. It’s a very photogenic fall, but I imagine it takes a pretty good rain to get it running well. The drainage above the dropoff is not very big.
It started raining again shortly after we reached the top of the falls so we quickly scrambled down to the bottom and took shelter under the huge horseshoe of a an overhang. I made a couple of multishot panos to try to get most of the overhanging bluff into one photo. I’ve visited a lot of the state’s waterfalls and this one might be the prettiest and most interesting I’ve seen.
The leaves had just barely started to turn. I’d like to catch this fall flowing well during peak leaf color.
It’s been an unusually cold winter in Little Rock. We got a decent snowfall on Friday and I ventured out Saturday afternoon to see what the country looked like with a blanket of white. I headed west of town and wound up at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Mt. Pinnacle was snow capped just like Pike’s Peak. Well, kinda like Pike’s Peak.
The Maumelle River was frozen. I couldn’t figure out what those weird holes in the slush/ice were. They were scattered all about and not just under the cypress trees.
Dinosaur tracks. I should’ve included a quarter in the photo to show scale. These tracks were huge, about 8 inches long.
An extended contingent of the Dailey family trucked up to Devil’s Den State Park for a camping trip and general fall frolic. We had three campers involved and my parents rented one of the rustic CCC cabins. The fall colors were blazing, but with all the visiting going on I didn’t get to really shoot many pictures. I did get one decent photo one morning as the sun rose above the mountain.
Abby, Gina and I embarked on our annual fall foliage expedition a couple of weeks ago. He set up our camper, Daisy, at the Buffalo Point campground as our base of operations for the weekend. The fall colors weren’t quite at their peak overall, but it was close. The dogwoods put on a vivid display of red.
We toured the Rush ghost town, home to a few historic buildings. The former blacksmith shop is my favorite for the great colors in the weathered wood siding. Rush was a Zinc mining center in the early 1900’s and was evidently a classic boom-bust town.
We dropped by the Collier Homestead at Tyler Bend to check out the historic structures and hike down to the river overlook.
Abby and I posed for a pic at the overlook.
I tried to do some fancy-schmancy flash photography, but my models were fairly divaish and I really didn’t get very far.
Dad and I stood a few dozen yards from the creek bank looking at the worse-for-wear ladder with the metal bucket hanging from it and speculated on how such a configuration might have come about. The ladder had been there for awhile for sure. Vines of what appeared to be poison ivy entwined along and around the two remaining rungs. It seemed obvious that the bucket came later and we remarked that it was somewhat interesting that the bucket hadn’t already been removed by some passerby. But it didn’t seem odd that the ladder and bucket were together. Painters famously use ladders and buckets simultaneously all the time. What was odd, however, was the location of the ladder and bucket. In the middle of nowhere. In the bottom of an Ozarks box canyon miles from the nearest road of any consequence. The bucket had a single bullet hole in it, so that might’ve been a clue. Dad expanded the scope and began describing the ancient ladders he had seen still hanging high in the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. Then we continued with our hike. In an epic episode of failing to put two and two together, we totally missed the significance of the bucket hanging from the ladder.
No real good reason for the title of this post, except for this.
Saturday didn’t promise to provide optimum conditions for waterfall photography, but I went out anyway. I had not given Schoolhouse Falls serious consideration, despite its being relatively close to my house, because Time Ernst’s description in his waterfall book is not exactly glowing. That was a mistake.
Easter
We thought the fall colors were pretty magnificent up in the Buffalo River country two weeks earlier, but by the first weekend in November, the Ouachita Mountains were putting on a crazy color show. We visited one of our favorite spots, Flatside Pinnacle, a mountain peak in the Flatside Wilderness, which is about an hour west of our house. It’s a very popular place for central Arkansas photographers. It’s a good spot for family outings because the trail to the top is pretty short and easy and the view is pretty spectacular. Abby is starting to show a fondness for rambling around these steep places. She gets that from me, I guess. It makes Gina really nervous. Thunderstorms boomed over Little Rock while we had mostly clear skies overhead. It made for a dramatic photo.
Then I turned around and caught a pretty dramatic sunset.