I found myself with a little free time Saturday and since I haven’t gotten a lot of chances to use my ultra-wide-angle lens, I went looking for something to shoot. I eventually ended up at the old bridge over the Maumelle River on an abandoned stretch of Arkansas Highway 300 in Pinnacle Mountain State Park. This bridge is popular with local photographers and rightly so. It’s old and rusty and corroded and interesting.
Arkansas has a split personality. High country and forest lie in the north and west and to the south and east it’s as flat as Kansas. Little Rock sits right on the dividing line. You can drive 30 minutes in one direction and climb a mountain; or drive 30 minutes in the opposite direction and see the curvature of the earth. On Saturday, Abby, Gina, Aunt Jodie and I loaded up and headed to the flat lands, where row-crop agriculture dominates.
On an earlier jaunt I had discovered a country road lined on either side with huge walnut trees that formed a leafy tunnel for a mile or so. We headed back there because I wanted to get a photo looking down the road in some nice afternoon light. That photo idea was a bust. It was still too early in the afternoon and the light was too harsh. We stopped near what looked like an old sharecropper shack to let Abby get out and play in the dirt. A man in a snazzy BMW showed up directly and told us we were on the end of his crop-duster landing strip and needed to move along. So we did.
I had a great idea for photo of the rising full moon from the top of Pinnacle Mountain, so on Friday I set out to complete the first part of my idea, which was to get to the top of the mountain. The trail is only .75 of a mile long, but it’s uphill all the way. Pinnacle Mountain State Park is only a few miles west of Little Rock and it’s a very popular place. The trail traverses great expanses of huge rocks and so many people have been over the trail the rocks are worn slick in most places. Slick enough to slip on even when dry. The mountain is about 1,000 in elevation (the highest hill around) and provides a commanding view of the Arkansas River, Lake Maumelle and other lesser mountains to the south and west.
I got to the top about an hour before the moonrise and about two hours before sunset, so I had some time to kill. In wandering around the peak looking for something to shoot, I was drawn to the ubiquitous graffiti. I decided to make a little photographic study of the marred rocks.
… like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.
I had been to Longpool Falls in Pope County north of Russellville back in January, but I didn’t get any photos worth looking at. So when a huge deluge hit that part of the state on Friday I decided to go back and see it when it had something to show. When I got up at 7:30 a.m. Saturday the rain had made it to Little Rock, but it was still raining in Pope County. I drove through torrential rain all the way there and the rain the didn’t stop. The top photo is a two-frame panorama of Longpool Falls and the ravine downstream.
Weird. It’s been weird this week. It feels like a pocket of calm before everything changes – again. Gina’s been out of town this week leaving Abby and me to forge ahead as a duo. Tuesday was extra dull and I asked Abby what she wanted to do and added that watching Calliou was not an option. She said, “Go to the Big Dam Bridge.” So that’s what we did.
I took my 70-300mm telephoto lens with us because I thought maybe there’d be some gulls flying around, but there weren’t. We walked up the bridge and watched a storm over Pinnacle Mountain. Then we walked down the bridge and out on an unpaved trail that branches off the North Little Rock River Trail. Abby was looking for fire ants. She’s taken a liking to stirring up their mounds and watching the ants go nuts and then running away shrieking. We got our shoes muddy and Abby saw some bugs, but no fire ants.
When I woke up at 7:30 a.m. Sunday, the sky was clearing after a night of off and on rain and I was so bummed I almost just went back to sleep. I hadn’t gone to sleep until around 4 a.m., which made actually getting up that much harder. (I think I’ve developed insomnia.) Sunny skies spell poor conditions for shooting waterfalls. You need the even, reduced light of overcast skies to make that silky water effect.
But, as we will see, Lady Fortune is a fickle traveling companion.
After my run Wednesday at Two Rivers Park I headed over to Pinnacle Mountain to see if there was anything worth shooting. I stopped at the arboretum off Pinnacle Mountain Road thinking I might get a shot of some cypress knees down by the Little Maumelle River. I did something to my knee during my run and I was limping pretty heavily. (I later made the self diagnosis of ilotibial band syndrome.) I barely made it to the river and to add insult to injury I couldn’t find anything swampy that I wanted to shoot.
On my limp back up he trail I came across this dead armadillo and decided to try my hand at a little Strobist style off-camera flash. I underexposed the ambient light and let the flash provide the correct exposure on the carcass. It didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned. I envisioned a well-lit corpse with a goodly expanse of dark forest in the background. But hand-holding the flash while trying to get low on a badly hurting knee while enduring the stink of a dead armadillo is harder than it sounds. I gave up after two frames and this is what I got.
It turns out late March is a horrible time to hold a jonquil festival in Arkansas.
We went down to the Historic Washington State Park Jonquil fest with our friends Jim and Brayden. It’s your average Arkansas town festival complete with corn dogs, kid activities and vendors selling useless tackiness at barely justified prices. The little town of Washington is covered up in daffodils of all kinds, but they were all but finished blooming. It put a pall over their namesake festival. I guess the organizers were trying to avoid competing with at least three other such celebrations that I know of across the state in March.
Copperhead Falls seen from the top.
This past weekend found me making yet another journey to our summer home in Northwest Arkansas to deal with the aftermath of the Epic Ice Storm of 2009. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do any manual labor this time. I just paid a man I hired over the over phone to climb up in our once magnificent shade trees and cut down the hanging limbs. I realize hiring people over the phone to perform work the results of which you won’t see for a week is fraught with hazard but it worked out well this time.
On my way back to Little Rock, I detoured over to the Buffalo River to hike Indian Creek and see Copperhead Falls and Tunnel Cave Falls. The hike is billed as a dangerous one, but I found it less hazardous than the hike to the slot canyon on Shop Creek I took a few weeks ago. Indian Creek is actually the next drainage over from Shop Creek. An ambitious hiker could do both in one day if he started early enough.
The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.
Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.