fall foliage

Not Quite Done

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Despite countless visits to Pinnacle Mountain since moving to Little Rock in 1994, I’d never made the hike to the east quarry area until today. The trail head is over on the north side of the park at the visitor center. At the beginning of the trail there’s a nice deck with a great view of the Arkansas River. The east quarry is about a mile and a half from the trail head and offers an even better view of the river. The photo above is the Big Maumelle River with Lake Maumelle way off in the background.

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I was pretty surprised by the amount of color still on the trees. I wished I had been up there last weekend when the color was probably at its best.

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Speak Of The Devil

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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.

Fall Has Fell

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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.

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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.

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We dropped by the Collier Homestead at Tyler Bend to check out the historic structures and hike down to the river overlook.

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Abby and I posed for a pic at the overlook.

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I tried to do some fancy-schmancy flash photography, but my models were fairly divaish and I really didn’t get very far.

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Random Ramble

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.

Camping Fools

For the second week in a row, and the third time in a month, we took Ol’ Leaky out for some camping action. It rained. Ol’ Leaky, as you might expect, leaked. It wasn’t too bad though. The rain was quite heavy but it didn’t last long. We stayed dry and warm and caught the leaks with a towel and a bucket.

We went to Lake Ouachita State Park on the eastern end of Lake Ouachita, Arkansas’ largest lake. I’d never been to the lake before, so we got to see a new-to-us area. The campground itself was excellent, complete with electric, water and sewer, though we didn’t use the sewer.

Dawn Patrol

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My Dad and I made our second-annual day-before-the-end-of-daylight-savings-time-sunrise pilgrimage on Saturday. The first annual DBTEODSTP was so successful, we decided to do it again. This year we went to Petit Jean State Park and caught the sunrise from Stout’s Point near the gravesite of Petit Jean herself. Several photographers had already assembled by the time we got there. The sunrise wasn’t all that great photographically, but it was pretty neat to hang out up there with my Dad.

Kings River Sunrise

A couple months ago when I went to check out Eagles Nest Falls in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area I found this magnificent view of the Kings River valley. I made a mental note to try to get back there to see the fall foliage at sunrise. I figured this Saturday would be perfect because the switch back to standard time on Sunday would make sunrise come earlier and make it less likely I would be able to get there early enough. (I realize that sunrise happens when it happens and we humans are the ones who put a time to it. But these are mental gymnastics I used to convince myself that rising at 5 a.m. was a good idea.) My dad was in town and he’s always up way too early and he enjoys a good hike, so he was game to go along with my idea.