May 31 - Here's a great photo from last week taken at the beginning of a multi-mile "rail bike" trip beside the Rio Grande River in Colorado near our campsite. Left to right - Dayton (Amber's partner in crime), Amber, my lovely bride, and Grandpa Ron (Pam's dad). It was reported that a grand time was had by all!

05/01/25 We had some nice heavy rain yesterday morning and I headed out early to Kevin’s Falls to get a photo of it running well. While much of the landscape was soaked Kevin’s little drainage was slow to join in the fun. I got a photo but vowed to return again later after an even larger rain event (so much of the landscape is sucking water for new life right now that sometimes even large rain events don’t produce a lot of flow.).

With more storms moving in later in the day I headed down south back to the front range of the Ozarks hoping to get good photos of three key new waterfalls there that Fireman Jeff and I had found a few weeks ago. When we first found this one tall waterfall Jeff was asking me how I came up with the names for them. Some of the time it’s rather obvious, like the name of the creek or hollow or some nearby feature that really sticks out. Other times my mind is blank and they will go unnamed for a while, which is fine (waterfalls don’t have official names anyway - those are really just for reference, and for FUN!). A few minutes later Jeff said - “Hey, look at those rocks - they look just like tombstones!” I looked up and saw that he was correct, and told him “so THIS is how you name a waterfall - this one will be called TOMBSTONE FALLS - that is perfect!” And that is how it is done.

And so yesterday I parked and headed into the Arkansas jungle up on a mountain that was SO thick that I could hardly see more than a step or two ahead of me. Everything was soaking from the recent rain - YIPPIE! - and so was I after just a couple of steps. Lots and LOTS of thorny vines in this area too, and often my forward progress was halted in mid-step while I struggled to break through the mess, sometimes when breaking free I would be thrown to the ground.

Often I can look ahead and get a general idea of the lay of the landscape, but not this time since the jungle was so thick. I knew the waterfall was DOWNhill from me to I just made sure i pointed myself down and kept going. In what seemed almost like no time at all I could hear water - that’s a good sign. I had already made it down the hill to the same level as the falls and it was just a matter of working my way over towards the sound.

And then THERE IT WAS! A tall thundering monster of a waterfall pouring over a beautiful tall bluff of layered sandstone. And the bluff was cut back under so I was able to get behind the falls out of the rain and also out of the splash of the waterfall. (I normally take pictures from the front of waterfalls but this one was splashing way too much to be able to keep my camera gear dry.) As I took refuge I hoped to be able to find another angle for the photo.

Son of a gun, right where I stopped to remove my heavy camera pack, looked out at this beautiful falls and saw - GUESS WHAT - a pair of black TOMBSTONES!!! Oh my gosh, they looked more like real tombstones from behind than from in front - what a LUCKY view I’d found! (maybe they were actual tombstones)

I spent the next 30 minutes working to get a good photo that showed not only the tombstones and waterfall, but also the beautiful bluff behind me - that was the tough part - trying to capture everything in a single photo - or rather trying to figure out what to include and what to leave out. That will come later. I got my photo, yea!

There were three other waterfalls in the area I’d not gotten photos of that we discovered several weeks ago, but with darkness approaching I wasn’t sure which one to try and get to since I could not get to all of them. Actually one was directly below me anyway, so I made a quick dash down to it and got some nice photos - also from behind it (in fact there was a small “fort” of stones piles up beneath the overhanging bluff in the back). The other two waterfalls were more distant and I would have to hike back out, drive to another location, then hike into another area of thick jungle - and then hike back out in the dark. No way I could do them both so I picked one, climbed back UP the steep hillside to the van, drove a mile or two and parked again.

It was already getting dark but it would be easy to follow an old road a mile downhill and then a short bushwhack over to and down to the base of this other nice waterfall (Jeff and his wife had found years ago). It was flowing when Jeff showed it to me a few weeks ago, but not enough for a good photo. I could hear water running all around me as I followed the old road down, down, and then down again - knowing all of those “downs” would all be UPs on the way back, but since I do enjoy hiking UPhill I didn’t mind.

As I got to the end of the little road a problem came up. It was pretty dark by this time and I was unable to make sense out of the terrain I could barely see in front of me and where I thought the waterfall was. After a few minutes of studying the little digital map on my phone and wandering around a little bit, I decided my best choice would be to ABORT the mission, turn around and climb back out to the car. I knew I was oh so close, but it just wasn’t work the risk of getting caught in the total darkness in the jungle. I’m not a fan of turning around, but sometimes ya just have ta… Hoping we’ll get more heavy rain in the next week and I can make another trip...

05/04/25 I'm allergic to mushrooms but do enjoy the many different types of textures they have.

Lots of Milkweed in the forest now (below) - food for monarch butterflies that will be migrating through...

05/09/25 A tale of puppies crossing the Great Plains this week - top photo is a rest stop in Oklahoma on Wednesday, bottom photo is our welcome to COLORADO the next day (some locations got several FEET of snow the night before). I'm at our summer campsite location near South Fork, Colorado getting some work done to be ready for camping - got snowed on within 30 minutes of our arrival yesterday! We're at 9,000' and everything around us was snow covered when we arrived, but now on Friday it's mostly melted off already - just a few patches of snow in our aspen forest. All the mountains above us and as fas as we can see still have lots of snow. It was 31 degrees at camp this morning. HAPPY FRIDAY TO YOU!

05/10/25 here's a snapshot during our chilly hike early this morning - still snow-capped mountains (Del Norte Peak) - note the aspens are golden even in SPRING!

05/11/25 I spent a good bit of time near 11,000’ yesterday evening waiting on clouds to clear so I could photograph an almost-full moon rising above the snowscape of the Continental Divide (Wolf Creek Pass area). Boys from Arkansas don’t get to see such sights too often, and with the snow melting in record time around me I wanted to see what I could find before all the snow had melted in the highest country.

There was plenty of snow on the divide mountains, but also lots of clouds swirling around. I found a spot and spend an hour or two waiting and taking pics of the snowy mountains. It was also cloudy to the west and no dramatic lighting from there that I was hoping for. No matter, it was GREAT to be there! A while after the allowed sunset time the view to the east opened up a bit and the almost-full moon appeared over the peaks and through the misty clouds.

A while later, as I was packing up and vowing to return in another day or two, I discovered there was lingering color directly behind me to the west, and so I swiveled the camera around and got some nice color with silhouetted (and dead) fir/spruce trees in the foreground. I consider most any time spent at high altitude to be good fortune for me, and this was no exception! (the puppies slept through it all, but that’s their job)

HAPPY MOM’S DAY TO THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE ON THE PLANET - THANK YOU!!!

05/14/25 - THIS is what I woke up to yesterday - a herd of ELK in our front yard in the mountains! (only the second or third time I've seen them there in ten years.) And the photo below the elk was today's view (it was 28 degrees). Our camper was delivered yesterday so now the pups have a much larger space to live in!

05/21/25 OOPS I skipped a week or more - SORRY! I made a mad dash back home to Arkansas, across the plains through the big hailstorm in Siloam Springs/Tontitown/Springdale just in time to get ou and photograph a couple of key waterfalls that I needed big rainfall for. Since then I've been on doctor duty - first and second for the pups (more than $1,000 worth), and third and forth for me and my teeth (just a tad over 4,000!!!). I'll be around for another week or so (more vet and dentist vists) before heading back out west. In the meantime I'm frantically working on that same big old elephant, doing one bite at a time, but am making progress. My time is running out so I have to chew a lot and fast! Supposed to be more rain this holiday weekend but I'll mostly be in the gallery at the computer.

05/25/25 Here's a snap of the pups while on our way home from Colorado a week ago. It was just before sunrise in a National Grassland near the New Mexico border. It was still pretty dim before at dawn but still we could see LOTS of prairie wildflowers, so lush after recent rainfall there. Just as the pups were approaching this particular patch of flowers a coyote not too far away started to yell out. Interestingly the pups hardly took notice but I figured it might be a mom with her own newborn pups and so I got my pups AWAY as quickly as possible and back to the van. It raining pups and kittys at home this morning - YIPPIE FOR WATERFALLS!