Little Bluff Cabin cam March 26 - Something about the sunriise thiis mornnig was special - it was so soft and glowy, cool and breezy with the airwaves filled with songbiirds - really feels liike sprinig now - we just NEED SOME RAIN - HAPPY WEDNSDAY TO YOU!

02/03/25 Sometimes I get a vision stuck in my head for a photo, and often no matter how hard I try I can never make it happen. (once in a while they DO work out, and so I keep trying) Such was/is the case for Thunderbird Cave that I visited a while ago with Fireman Jeff. During our short visit an image popped into my head that would require certain light conditions, and a particular special camera lens that I didn’t own, so I planned to return at some point. A few days ago a window of opportunity opened up for possible weather and light conditions to be good for this so I got all of my ducks in a row. One duck I really needed was a new lens (CERTAINLY I already have ENOUGH camera lenses, but no, not a specific one I really needed for this one.) I ended up renting two different lenses and hoped that one of them might work.

Time ticked off slowly as I waited for the FedX truck from Springdale to arrive with my lenses. I began to sweat. Then curse. And then BINGO, the lenses arrived. With no time to waste I didn’t even bother to open the boxes I just sped off towards an unmarked wide spot in the road out in the national forest.

I’ll pause here a moment to say that I just finished typing up this story and realized it was about five pages long, WAY too long! So I’m just going to cut to the chase and not bore you to death, I hope.

There’s no trail to this location, but are at least three different bushwhack routes to get there - none easy, all requiring difficult bushwhacks through steep and rugged terrain. I picked the quickest and most straight-forward route, but soon learned one spot in particular was kind of “iffy” and one slip would ruin my day. I managed to get through it OK but decided to find another route on the way out.

By the way, I now carry three different emergency devices when I bushwhack alone, and while a fatal accident can happen anywhere, anytime - especially in the city - I try to be extra careful when alone - the last thing I want is my name involved with a search and/or rescue!

I was late getting to the cave and missed my planned sunset shot (the first of three different photos I had wanted to make of this most interesting “cave” opening) - although turns out a massive controlled burn to the west kind of messed the scene up anyway. Bummer. My lack of luck continued when I realized one of the two rented lenses didn’t fit my camera tripod mounting system, and I really needed that lens on my tripod for the all-night star trail photo (second of the three photos I wanted to do).

So my new plan was simply to hike/bushwhack back to the car, sleep a few hours in the back, then return to the cave for sunrise, shot #3. This part of the plan I didn’t really think through very well. I had multiple light sources, but not the HEADlamp I really needed to negotiate difficult terrain that required both hands to claw my way through. I ended up slowly making my way through a new route that took me across a small portion of private property and out to a series of driveways (I try NEVER to trespass but this seemed like an almost-emergency). I’m sure my sorry-looking dark figure was captured on at least a couple of FLOOD LIGHT gate cameras I hiked past. SORRY!

I was awake and back in the woods by 3am and had plotted a new, longer bushwhack route around all private property and also bypassing the sketchy area from before. But this route required me to find a route down through a large and long bluff line, in the dark, and not knowing if such a route existed. After 30 minutes of hunting I actually was amazed to discover a quite narrow and steep but perfectly safe break in the bluff line that got me down below it - YIPPIE!

OH CRUD, this is still taking me forever to write.

I made it back to the cave in time for sunrise, took a few photos, then bushwhacked back to the car - this time using a fourth different route through the rugged terrain. I’ll only say that at one point the hillside was SO steep that I really could not see very far above me - in fact I was down on my hands and knees trying to claw my way up the hill, and with my bike helmet on I could not raise my eyes up enough to see more than a few feet in front of me. Sometimes I would reach our and grab a big chunk of the hillside and then bring my feet up underneath me, and then my feet would slip and I’d slide back down the mountain - it had to have been so funny! But I made it OK - I only have one photo to show you though, taken right after sunrise (the sun is behind the camera position as planned - I wanted the first colorful rays of sunshine hitting the distant hills). I never got to shoot the “star trail” sequence at the cave that I really wanted.

Later that day I set up my camera a little closer to home to make a "star trail" sequence to capture the earth’s rotation (that I didn’t get to do at the cave) - the camera would take several hundred photos and later I’d combine them to produce “star trails.” This was a test to see what the stars would look like if I did this back at the cave. When I returned to pickup my camera the next morning I discovered the camera was flawed and didn’t work! After a bit of detective work I figured out a work around and was set me camera back out the next night and this time was able to get it to capture the star trails I had wanted to get at Thunderbird cave.

This is what the stars looked like from a ridgetop overlooking the greater Ponca Metro area - my camera recorded about five hours worth of the earth's rotation - each line or "star trail" is a bright star or planet. The "light dome" is light from the Northwest Arkansas metro area.

OK, done! But I still don’t have the photo I went after at the cave, so I plan to return (might take two or three different trips to accomplish) - maybe even be fully prepared this time!

TOMORROW I hope to tell you about the elephant in the room...

03/04/25 THIS is the elephant in the room that has been here since 2011 - when the second edition of the waterfalls guidebook was publiished. I've documented nearly 1,000 waterfalls for possible addition to this new edition, but can really only include probably 100 in the new guidebook, which I MUST complete this year. I've already procrastinated 14 years, getting a LOT of work done along the way, but that behavior has to stop! My lovely bride* mentioned something about an elephant, and so THIS is how I've been working on eating that elephant - one bite at a time. As of today I probably have taken maybe two bites out of thousands, but at least I AM making progress! (*Pam will eventually be in charge of drawing more than 100 new maps for all the new waterfalls, but she can't start that process until I've taken a few hundred more bites and collected a lot more data.)

IN maybe an unrelated note - I've gained six pounds in the past month!!!

03/05/25 After several weeks work I have formed the basic list of new waterfalls in the Buffalo River section, which includes name, measured height, parking GPS coordoinates, waterfall coordinates, and a good photo of each. I'll have to return to most of these to collect additional data like driving and hiking directions, descriptions, and distances. Sometimes this will be quick and easy - like yesterday I measured two waterfalls that were more than 100' tall. Only took me an hour to drive and hike to, but was significent info I really needed but for some reason never recorded before.

This morning while working (computer work) on two brand new sets of waterfalls in another part of the Ozarks I discovered I forgot to measure the height of the first three, so now I'll have to make a trip back to them, about 4-5 hours roundtrip. Silly me - I usually ALWAYS list the height along with the GPS waypoint I make for each waterfall. Costly mistake on my part! (on the other hand I'll get to go revist a really beautiful series of waterfalls!)

Probably 75% or more of all this work is sitting at the computer putting all of this data together, hunting down photo files, etc. The actual "getting out and taking photos of the waterfalls" is really a small part of the overall project, and is something I've been working on for 14 years. Without any organized method to my photo madness all those years I'm having to search through literally hundreds of thousands of photos to find the ones I need. I've always tried to take a phone photo of each one that is supposed to end up on a GPS mapping app - so that I can get the date of my visit and look up the photos taken with a "real" camera. And that has worked out pretty well for about half of these photos, but still a lot more to find.

Overall I wiill probably need to visit and document stiill another 30-40 waterfalls that are on my hit list - most I have been to before but my list of must-sees that I have not been to still grows a little bit each day. In the end I wiill probably have documented hundreds and hundreds of new waterfalls, but only a fraction of those will be included in the new guidebook - simply not enough space nor cost-prohibitive (who wants to buy a five pound, $50 guidebook!?).

03/05/25 A dusting of snow along the trail to work this morning...

03/08/25 I got an early start Friday morning and headed to Fayetteville for my annual eye exam at MCDONALDS EYE CLINIC. But first I needed to make sure I had my Geezer and Heath Insurance cards. OOPS, my WALLET was MISSING with ALL my life’s documents in it!!! I rarely use my wallet - dont’ carry it with me, only have it in the car. And of course I hide it very well in the car. Problem is, sometimes I hide it so well I can’t find it, haha. That seemed to be the case this morning. I looked everywhere, as did my lovely bride.

I printed copies of everything and sped away (actually I drove very slowly - didn’t want to get pulled over speeding not being able to produce my driver’s license!)

When I got home later the search continued. Last time I laid eyes on my wallet was eight days before to get gas in Jasper. Is it sad I hadn’t noticed my wallet was missing for more than a week? (None of my credit cards had been used so it probably had not been stolen.) So I began a through process of looking everywhere, then twice, then three times. I emptied out my car into the garage, and again into the office - that little black folded fake leather thing had to be there somewhere! But no luck. So I decided to go visit all the places I went to after I used the wallet at the gas station.

First I went to the gas station but they had none turned in. Then Dollar General in Jasper, then Dollar General in Deer. The guy there said “wait a minute” and my spirits rose as he got down on the floor, opened a big black safe, and reached far into the back. "NOPE, nothing had been turned in." RATS! The only other place I’d been that day was back to Thunderbird Cave, where I had spent most of the night, and so I continued my search on past Deer, Lurton, until I came to a stop at the unmarked side of a forest road in the middle of nowhere. Certainly if my wallet had fallen out of the car there’s no way it could have gone unnoticed sitting along a public road? But I had to try. I searched every inch of that roadside, ditch, and the hillside below. Nothing.

(I know - should have had an apple air tag on it, but I didn’t, so…)

OK, no wallet. I was out of ideas. BUT, I did have my camera with me so why not just go bushwhack on over, down, UP, and along the top of the bluff and take a another picture or two of Thunderbird Cave? And so I set off. It didn’t take me long to find the narrow ramp/bear crack in the big bluff and scoot my way on down a very steep hillside - aided now and then by the hillside being so steep that my best mode of travel was so sit down on my BUTT and just let gravity take me. When you really get going it’s pretty funny - you just have to make sure you don’t get out of control.

Soon I had reached the bottom of the hill, crossed a creek, and started up the other side - very STEEP and slippery. But unlike my previous trip into and out of this canyon, I didn’t have to get down on all fours and claw up - in fact I was able to pretty much just GO straight up without any issues - how did that happen? (my heart rate topped out at 146, not sure if that was good or not, but it was steady) Turns out while in Fayetteville after my eye doctor visit that morning* I stopped by the Pack Rat Outdoor Center and bought a new pair of boots - Lowe Renegades - my fifth pair. I LOVE these boots - they replaced my longtime favorite Vasque Sundowner boots I wore for years (until the company started producing terrible copies). And even though I had just put these new boots on right out of the box (you NORMALLY should BREAK boots in for a while before using them), they fit and felt great and the new treats dug right on into the soft hillside. What a difference good boots make!

*By the way, I failed to mention that after all the eye exams and testing it turns out that my 20/20 vision eyesight was not only as good as last year, but in fact BETTER! (Glaucoma is creeping into one eye, but after a year of nightly eye drops the pressure in that eye had gone down - YEA!)

As luck would have it I managed to reach Thunderbird Cave in time to scramble around frantically to get a good composition for sunset, which was one of the several visions I had wanted to photograph at this new-iconic location. I had packed a tent with me (along with more than one flashlight) and was hoping to also get a shot of the tent at sunset, but that was not to be. Turns out that not only was the wind blowing pretty had, but also whatever wind there is gets magnified as it blows through this wide opening that narrows down to just a few feet - it was impossible for me to even get the tent put together. That was a good thing because if I had tried to set it up out on the edge of the bluff it surely would have been blown off into the next county!

The best I could do was cut my losses and head back to the car. With a 1/2 moon overhead providing a bit of glow I decided to hike as far back as I could without using a flashlight. Unfortunately I did NOT bring clear goggles with me, which I usually do when bushwhacking during the day, and certainly always when doing so at night. Son of a gun, I hadn’t gone 1/2 mile when I reached out to move a branch away and somehow that branch flipped right back and smashed my face, including my right EYE - OUCH! My 20/20 vision went down to about 20/nothing and I feared I had done some real damage to my prized pupil (or cornea?).

I carried on one-eyed but at a much slower pace as it got pretty dark, especially down there in the bottom of the canyon where the moonlight did not seem to reach.

As before, I slipped and slid my way on down to and across the creek and then started what at times was a nearly vertical scramble up the steep hillside - again, thank goodness for the new BOOTS!

Normally when I bushwhack through the forest at night I don’t pay much attention to wild critters - or the thought of giant bears and bigfoot or mountain lions just standing around waiting to eat me. But as I got up closer to the bottom of the big bluff I was approaching, I did get to thinking about the narrow ramp/bear crack that was my secret route up through the bluff to the top. Wouldn’t that make a perfect AMBUSH spot for a cougar to sit and wait - one simple pounce and I’d be kitty food.

When I found the ramp entrance I stopped and looked up and around - and had a little chill run down my spine. I think I actually picked up a big stick to wave above my head. And I started to sing a Taylor Swift song - just in case the big cat was a Swiftie. The bluff at this point was probably 40’ tall, and the ramp probably 100’ long. My boots carried me to the safety of a cougar-free bluff top, then an easy hike back to the car. THAT was a close one!

Back home the next morning I had the gallery open for the day, and once again emptied the van to look around inside. At one point I just sat in the back seat in the empty van and pondered WHERE could I have possibly HID that wallet - I just KNEW it had to be in there SOMEWHERE, hiding from ME for more than a week!

I gotta tell ya, this was kind of surreal. But while sitting there I got a text from my bride that our dear friend, Judy McDonald, had just passed away from a long struggle with ALS. We all knew it was coming, but you never really know when. So sad, all the way around. Judy was a ROCK, pure diamond. At that moment, I put my phone down, and for some reason reached over and pulled back a black rubber floor mat (there are eight of them in this van, all black) - and right underneath there was my black wallet, sitting on the black carpet, right where I had hid it...

There's a heavy gloom over the landscape and in our hearts this morning. One of the most remarkable women we've ever had the great forturne to meet and spend time with has passed away - Judy McDonald of Fayetteville. While we're sure she had an auto-pass directly into heaven, it's quite likely that there was a scuffle at the gate - I suspect if she had a choice she is in Dog Heaven now, continuing her work to save and comfort as many pups as possible. We love you Judy, for all of the ways humanily possible, and especially for the remarkable ways you had to invent to make the world a better place for all...

03/12/25 Sorry, but here's yet another photo of Thunderbird Cave - you might notice a slight lean to the tent due to extremely high winds! This was taken last night looking directly into smoke from a 4,000-acre controlled burn (I'll have some notes about that trip posted later this week).

03/14/25 Here's the Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse from early this morning (see the story below). Due to a comedy of errors on my part* I missed the actual "total" part of the eclipse, but did manage to get a couple of shots as the moon began to emerge from earth's shadow as you see here.

*This month marks my 50th anniversary as a professional photographer, and even with all that "experience" I still FORGOT one tiny but important piece of camera equipment. Oh well, there will be another one next year maybe.

03/15/25 I had a couple different locations picked out for the Blood Moon Eclipse early yesterday morning. The prime location was a giant waterfall in the Buffalo River area, but with no rain all week it wasn’t going to be running well enough so I went to Plan B. When the clouds rolled in Thursday evening that plan got scrapped too. In fact all of my alternate locations were scrapped - ya gotta have clear sky for an eclipse photo.

At the last minute - just before midnight - on a special weather APP that I use (Windy.com), it was showing the clouds would be moving out of a corner of Madison County to the west next door, but not until about midway through the eclipse. That was OK for me, so I headed west and found a spot with a clear view where the moon would eventually be visible. Right on cue the clouds moved out and the already-half eclipsed moon began to appear - YIPPIE!

This month marks my 50th year as a professional photographer. But even with all of that experience I discovered a missing critical part to my eclipse-photo equipment - I FORGOT to bring a special adapter that allows my giant 600mm lens to be connected to my equally giant 100 megapixel camera! OH CRUD!

OK, so I had two choices - go ahead and use my backup camera and a different big lens for the eclipse - or drive back home and get the adapter, hoping the clouds would clear up somewhere in that area by the time the eclipse reached it’s maximum coverage - that’s when the moon is the most red. Staying put and using the backup camera was a sure thing - driving back home was a gamble, but might result in a better photo due to the better camera and lens system.

I decided to roll the dice and head back home. I’ve been driving around a lot at night this past month and have yet to have an encounter with a deer in the headlights. But sure enough, the deer population heard I was coming and decided to wander out into the middle of the highway all along my route. I was able to slow down enough or even stop in time a time or two and all deer remained safe - I was a nervous wreck though - I knew that directly above me the eclipse was happening and my time was running out, but I had to maintain a safe “anti-deer” speed.

Once back home the clouds were still up there and I once again could not see the moon - time was running out. OH CRUD #2!!

I headed out again towards the west and clear sky, but no specific location in mind. Over the past 30 years I’ve mentally cataloged quite a few “naked” trees in this area that could make interesting silhouetted subjects for sunrises, sunsets, clouds, etc., and you’ve probably seen many of them in my photos. Right after I passed the turnoff to one of these trees the sky began to clear once (yea!) and I swung around and headed for it. By the time I got everything set up and the moon in focus with the tree nicely standing in front, I realized the eclipse totality had ENDED - OH CRUD #3!!! (If you look at this photo you can see a sliver of blown-out moon in the upper left edge.)

After all that scrambling it was still a beautiful scene and surreal moment with the tall oak silhouetted against the dark blue clouds and that magical Blood Moon, with such unique color that only comes around once in a great while. NOT happy with me making such a rookie mistake, but I’ll take it. And I did - I shot about 30 photos as the color drained away from the moon. The very first photo I took was the best...

03/20/25 A bit of frozen white stuff on the deck this morning - wasn't it iust 80 degrees? Must be SPRING in the High Ozarks...

03/21/25 There was some really weird activity going on last night in the sky as I was out taking a few star photos. The one above is just a simple shot of the star Sirius (and not weird at all), although the exposure was four-minutes long, and was taken with a 16mm ultra-wide lens, so it was really just a dot in the overall photo. But since I was using such a high resolution camera this is the view of the star at 100% view, no enlargement. It was one of the brightest objects in the sky, and was blue, though the long exposure made it look larger and brighter and with more spikes than it probably had. The weird stuff probably was military aircraft doing their normal training, but some of it I'd never seen before. At times there appeared to be new sets of constellations in the sky - I mean really bright stars that stood out as a group. At first I wasn't sure about them, then watched as the individual spots moved around in different directions and then disappeared from sight. (they weren't moving like satellites or planes, nor shooting off flares like I've seen before). Anyway, it was a beautiful DARK night sky and for the first time in WEEKS there was NO WIND!

03/23/25 WILD PLUM trees are blooming at our historic homestead near the gallery, and all across the High Ozarks no doubt. The very first trees to bloom in the spring here are serviceberry trees (aka popcorn or sarvis trees). Wild plums and redbuds are next, followed by dogwoods later in April and May.