SILVER FALLS FALL

South Falls from the canyon floor

I wish I could write poetry about the last warm, sunny days of autumn.  I’d try to explain how, despite the morning’s cold, I’ve worked up a little sweat hiking to the canyon floor, and now, coming to a standstill behind my tripod, I shiver as I wait and watch the Sun’s fingers prod and probe through the trees and mist, slowly — imperceptibly — prying their way into the shrouded canyon. The noon’s warmth is yet just a feeble promise. I am glad to start walking again.

South Falls from the canyon rim

The sun continues to rise in defiance of the autumn’s measured coup. Where the sun gazes, leaves burst into the colors of wildfire.

South Falls (detail)

Near the Silver Falls Lodge, a roofed enclosure shelters a small theater where a video loop tells its short story over and over to empty benches. It features a man who captained a canoe over the South Falls in a money making gambit. The camera’s vintage footage shows a close-up of his face and does a creditable job of preserving all the craziness in his oblivious smile as he sits in his hospital bed, mending all his broken bones.

South Falls (from the trail)

The waterfall makes background noise like the noise of a distant interstate, like some irrefutable subliminal conspiracy, and this never ending subtext whispers continually as the dawn reveals the trees undressing.

Yes. It's still South Falls

The trees look all innocent, as if they didn’t see the raccoons cavorting, or witness the bats dancing and the owls performing acrobatics.  The trees hold their limbs in perpetual shrugs. The possums play possum. The bears quietly bide their time, waiting for the right moment.

Yes, still.

Leaves become compost, moss thrives. Life and decay are juxtaposed and somehow, without human intervention, it all looks beautiful and verdant and smells like a pine forest. Oh why can’t it work like that in my shower?

...still

A jungle setting fit for a fruit loop bird.

O.K. Pretty sure that's the last one.

The sun slices the world into warms and cools.

Atop the stairs to Lower South Falls

How lucky we are that we have trails to follow and from which we can branch off. How unfortunate that we don’t appreciate the cumulative efforts and compromises it took to make them.

Lower South Falls

Waterfalls:  Beautiful engines of destruction.

Silver Creek, South Fork

I don’t remember where I learned this photographer’s maxim, or even if it is one — I suppose it works as well for tenderfoots in cougar country. But it goes, “Don’t forget to look behind you.”

Silver Creek, South Fork

A long exposure reveals the paths that water chooses.

Lower North Falls

Having descended the Silver Creek South Fork, I realize I’m now ascending the Silver Creek North Fork — because how else to explain the change in direction of the water’s flow?

Double Falls

In horror movies, sometimes it is best not to show too much of the monster, too early.

Sometimes, a shy, partially dressed naked person is more provocative than an in-your-face completely naked person.

So too, it may be, that a visually obstructed waterfall may hold more mystery and beauty than an isolated waterfall. Here, I hope the trees add descriptive poetry with delicate calligraphy branches, or accentuate a point with pointers aflame in golden leaves.

Double Falls

The sun throws spotlights on the amphitheater stage.

Double Falls

In the background, the water whispers disparaging remarks to stoic rocks in a play that repeats through the eons.

On the canyon trail above, but not showing Drake Falls

Great beams of light search the valley floor, as if the sun ( at the last minute ) has forgotten something it needs to take on vacation into winter.

Middle North Falls

At this moment, the difference between cool and warm, summer and winter, vibrant life and still hibernation, all seems poised on the edge of a razor.

Middle North Falls

My long exposure seems to foreshadow a near future when time will be frozen.

Winter Falls

Winter Falls, vanquished in summer, lays its plans for the future by saturating the earth and filling the cracks in obstinate rocks where it waits patiently for freezing temperatures and its wedge-forming metamorphosis into solid matter.

North Falls

North Falls has made considerable headway in its efforts to ascend the North Fork...

Mr. T. braving seismic catastrophe to capture his images of North Falls 

…so much so that I am uneasy under the shelf of rock that even now seems over-extended.

Parting view of North Falls