Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

We had such a great time in the eastern Missouri Ozarks a couple weeks ago that we convinced my sister and her fiance, Richard, to meet us to spend one day of their visit over there before coming to Carbondale.  They would fly into St. Louis and we would drive over to meet them.  The question was "how?".  The Chester bridge was still closed, and so we would go through Cape Girardeau.  We planned to head out some time Friday evening.  Luckily, I noticed an alert that morning warning us that routes 3 and 146 would be closing at 7pm, so we got into high gear to get down there before that.  We made it to McClure around 6:15pm and sat for about 45 minutes.  I think it was just after 7 when we got to drive through and we saw them close the road behind us.   I had wanted to do some long-exposures of the flooding, but realized quickly that it wasn't situationally appropriate to stop and set up a tripod on the side of the highway and that we shou...

Motivated by our newfound appreciation for nature portraits, we took an afternoon trip to Splatterstone Falls (aka Black Rock, aka Boulder Creek Falls, aka aka...) and the more well-known Burden Falls in the Shawnee NF.  A special treat was that Kate and her adorable dog Sadie joined us for the hike! Some of the members of the Shawnee NF Facebook page were kind enough to provide some directions to Splatterstone as it requires some bushwhacking.  Unfortunately, I failed to upload the points correctly, so we had a bit of an adventure getting there.  I had a rough idea of where it was in the valley south of trail 1770, so we took off through the woods and down the slope.  We heard water running and stepped out into the shallow creek bed above the falls only 15 feet from the drop!  What luck! Or so we thought.  I had seen maybe five pictures of the falls and none of them really gave me any sense of scale.  I thought it was maybe 20 feet tall....