Weekend getaway to the Missouri Ozarks: part I

Laura is sweet and came up with another idea for an overnight getaway.  The focus was to go see Johnson Shut-ins in the Missouri Ozarks.  When we were trying to find a place to stay, I opened the Dark Sky Map and saw that there's a large area west of there.  Laura quickly found that Echo Bluffs State Park, only two-years old, has a nice lodge overlooking a creek, and she booked it.  I picked out a few stops on the way there and our trip was already overbooked.  We stopped where we could along the way and just enjoyed the ride.

First, we stopped and took a short hike to Blue Spring.  To put the name in perspective, I did not edit this picture at all.  The color you see is what we saw in person!


A few more pictures from Blue Spring:







The huge volume of water coming out of the spring flows over rocks and aquatic plants, setting up some other nice photos.




Next, we headed to Round Spring on the way to Echo Bluffs.  We walked around what may be the secondary outlet of the spring and saw a hen wood duck riding the current through the vegetation.  We took the short hike around to the main spring where we saw another brilliant blue water body.  The flow was coming up to the surface and then slowly flowing into the cave shown below.  It flows through and comes out where we saw the wood duck earlier.  At one point, we heard a crazy commotion in the cave and wondered what cave monster was responsible.  As we hiked back to the car, we stumbled upon a river otter swimming out of the outlet of the cave.  The culprit!



We made it to the Echo Bluff State Park lodge with some daylight left.  We checked in and then rushed down to the creek near the bluff.  We wanted to use the Photopills app to plan our night photos while we could still see our way around.  The app allows us to hold our phones up to the sky and see where the Milky Way will be at different times of the night, which is super useful.  We selected a few compositions and some spots where we could set the tripod in the creek gravel.  After the planning session, we headed to dinner at the restaurant in the lodge, which was a delicious, fancy meal.  Service was slow, but we were waiting for dark to set in anyway.

-- John

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