Every fall I intend to go out and shoot some epic fall foliage and every year I seem to miss the great color. So the third week in October we planned to take Daisy up in the Ozarks and do the classic-fall-foliage-gawking thing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find an RV park with hookups that had any vacancies for that weekend. We had to settle for a hotel room in Harrison.
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.
The new bridge at Two Rivers Park. I thought black and white captured the moment so nicely.
A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.
It’s been so hot for so long here that 105 degree days are no longer remarkable. A couple weeks ago we decided to hit the coolest spot in the state that’s not inside a building: Blanchard Springs Caverns. Abby referred to it as going into the earth.
We made our annual trip to Wye Mountain a couple of weeks ago to see the daffodils. Abby’s Mimi was on hand for this year’s trip.
Sometimes Abby, Gina and I jump in the car and head off in some random direction. We ended up in Fordyce on Sunday. Fordyce’s only claim to fame that I know of is that Keith Richards was arrested there in 1975. When we got there we could’ve murdered someone on Main Street and gotten away with it because we were the only souls downtown. It was nice because no one was around to hassle us as we explored the ruins.
I got in some good brick-wall-shooting practice. I wonder why someone would label the burglar alarm in big red letters. It seems to me that you’d want to keep the location of the alarm under wraps so that a burglar wouldn’t destroy it before pillaging your building. Of course it’s about 20 feet up on the wall so maybe it’s safe up there.
Rex’s Liquor looked like a great place to score some Mad Dog 20/20.
Rex also has this great side entrance in case you don’t want anybody out on the street to see you going in.
Southern hospitality.
I did something to this photo I’ve never had the patience to do before successfully. A big guy wire from a phone pole extended from corner to corner totally marring the shot. I removed it using the magical content-aware-fill function in Photoshop CS5. I found an instructional video on on YouTube demonstrating how to do it.
Out behind the Dallas County Museum is a weird garden of signs with nuggets about the area’s history.
Fordyce is evidently proud of its high school sports teams, which have the redbug as the mascot. The redbug is more commonly known as the chigger, a most unpleasant parasite. (Note the sign in the previous picture explaining that Fordyce introduced the state to high school football.) This mural celebrating that first team is inside another building ruin that’s been cleaned up. Murals cover the walls on both sides with scenes of various high school sports, football through the years, basketball, baseball, track and golf. All the murals have the bizarre sea of chiggers rising from the bottom to suck the blood of the athletes.
My buddy Kurt and I hiked Indian Creek in the Buffalo National River a week ago. The creek is home to two waterfalls highlighted in the Tim Ernst Arkansas Waterfalls book: Copperhead Falls (seen above with Kurt posing) and Tunnel Cave Falls, formed by water exiting a cave. The trail begins at the campground at Kyle’s Landing and runs a little over two miles up into a box canyon. It’s a great hike. The park service doesn’t maintain the trail and it gets pretty rough in some places. I wouldn’t recommend it for the weak-ankled.
This was a weird hike photographically for me. I didn’t take many photos. For one thing, I did this hike a couple of years ago and shot a bunch of photos then. For another thing, I usually do these long hikes alone, which leaves me free to screw around and shoot photos that don’t end up being any good. Because I had a companion on this trip, I had other things to do, mainly flapping my gums with Kurt. For some reason I can’t seem to talk and take pictures at the same time. Kurt, however, had his camera out the whole time shooting me and the scenery and handing me his camera so I could shoot him and the scenery together. I didn’t mind. It’s more fun to have somebody along. Finally, Kurt asked me if I was going to take a photo of anything at all. So I snapped out of it and shot a bunch pictures of him in action.
This is my favorite one. Kurt emerging from the pit toilet at Kyle’s Landing with the sunset in the background.
The namesake cave for Tunnel Cave Falls is closed to explorers, but even if it wasn’t off-limits it appears a dicey proposition to enter it with it being 30 feet up a sheer bluff wall. No, I didn’t take a photo of the cave itself. I told you I didn’t do a very good job with the photography. The waterfall was dry, anyway.
I did manage to provide Kurt with a nice profile photo for his Facebook page.
It snowed again on Friday and I went out to Pinnacle Mountain to take some photos of it.
A couple of weekends ago we set out for the Ozarks to see if we could find some snow still on the ground. We headed north on Highway 7 at Russellville and ended up at Pam’s Grotto to check out the waterfall. The waterfall wasn’t running very well, but the hike was fun. It was Abby’s first real hike in the woods and she did the 1.5 mile round trip like a champ.