exploring – Post Irony

Waterfall In The Fall

By Don on Sunday, October 26, 2014

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.

Big Bend National Park exploring Family Fun Hiking Photography Vacation

Return to the Bend – Day 2

By Don on Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Our second day in the desert got off to an inauspicious start. We made the long drive over to Dagger Flat in hopes that a sea of yucca would be in full magnificent bloom. We’d seen many yuccas blooming in some areas of the park so I had high hopes. After a jouncey seven-mile drive on a dirt track we broke through into the flat and ….. nothing. The big bloom hadn’t started yet. So it was back to the drawing board. We headed over to the Grapevine Hills to hike the short trail through a geologic wonderland. Nana and Gramps had other plans so we didn’t catch up with them until later. It being midday, the light was harsh so the photography wasn’t that great.

The little mountain range is the remains of an eroded igneous intrusion. It’s littered with all manner of red flaky boulders. The first mile was a nice stroll on a well-beaten, flat path, but the final quarter mile was a pretty decent climb. In the warmer parts of the year the little valley is probably a furnace, but we had a nice day with temps in the lower 80s. The area looks like a classic place for the hero in a cowboy picture to get trapped by wild Comanches. Abby was dying to see some javelinas and she finally got her chance. They were sneaking around in the brush around a spring so I couldn’t get a picture.

Abby used her binoculars to watch for Indians. Note how she leaned up against a rock to keep from sky-lining herself and becoming an easy target. Louis L’Amour would have been proud.

The payoff at the end of the trail is this balancing rock situation and a magnificent view of the untrammeled desert beyond.

The ocotillo or Devil’s buggy whip was putting on a show across the park. A veritable forest of the thorny plants grows near the west entrance to the park. I went out there at sunset hoping to get a great sunset I could silhouette the branches and flowers against. The sunset was a dud so I did the best I could. The wind was blowing hard, causing the stems to sway and blurring most of the flowers. Right at dark a bunch of humming birds descended on flowers, so that was pretty neat.

Arkansas Buffalo National River Camping exploring fall foliage Family Fun

Fall Has Fell

By Don on Thursday, November 7, 2013

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.

Arkansas exploring Hiking Schoolhouse Falls Waterfall

Schoolhouse Rock

By Don on Sunday, April 21, 2013

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.

Arkansas exploring Hiking Lost Valley Photography

Fall In The Ozarks

By Don on Wednesday, November 7, 2012

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.

exploring Hiking

Scattershooting …

By Don on Wednesday, March 14, 2012

… while wondering whatever happened to Blackie Sherrod, who inexplicably doesn’t rate a Wikipedia entry. Life’s been pretty dull since I started my part-time job back in November. But I need to clean out the ol’ notebook so here’s a collection of recent photos and the mind-numbing stories behind them. Up top we have the old post office in Scotland, Ark. A few weeks ago Gina, Abby and I toured lower Van Buren County, new territory for us. The tiny burg of Scotland looked pretty interesting. We’ll have to go back sometime. I was pretty disappointed to later observe a newer, shinier Scotland post office on the main highway.

Arkansas Buffalo National River exploring fall foliage Photography

Random Ramble

By Don on Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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.

Arkansas Crater of Diamonds exploring Family Fun

Like Looking For A Diamond In a Giant Dirt Field

By Don on Thursday, September 1, 2011

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.

Arkansas exploring Family Fun

Into The Earth

By Don on Sunday, August 7, 2011

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.

Arkansas exploring Photography

Tumblin’ Fordyce

By Don on Friday, March 4, 2011

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.