Old meets "young": Milky Way on the Cache River

Age is but a number, and "old" can also be "young" depending on the frame of reference.  Micah and I, a pair of thirty-somethings, traveled to the Cache River to see some "young" trees cast against the "old" Milky Way galaxy and it was a mystical trip.

We had managed to get out to Kinkaid Spillway and Little Cedar Spillway in May during the new moon, when the Milky Way is most visible, but most nights during that week were cloudy.  We were hoping to get out once more, so I did some planning and found a few nights where the roughly half-moon would set early enough to give us a few hours of dark.  Early in our summer Milky Way planning back in April, Micah had the great idea to shoot from the Lower Cache Access on Perks Access Road, which faces southward, and therefore works well for seeing the Milky Way core.  

I, of course, always make things more complicated.  I was thinking about trying to take a picture of the state champion bald cypress tree, but it is about 100 yards from dry land. I hoped to wade in the water near the tree.  Serendipitously, someone posted pictures of the tree on the Shawnee National Forest Facebook group and shared some information with me.  Between his pictures, his information about water depths, and some detailed mapping exercises, I figured out that I could wade and get a nice clean shot without much brush when the MW was to the SE.  The moon was now waxing, but I realized that a shot facing SE at the tree during the waxing moon would be right around moonset.  That got me excited because I could possibly use the light from the moon setting to the west to illuminate the tree.    

During the drive down, I spotted a raccoon (the streak continues!), a possum, and plenty of deer.  I backed the truck up to the boat ramp and we casually unloaded the canoe.  I was glad that we were early because then we had no rush.  I was still parked on the ramp like a citiot when someone else pulled up, but they weren't launching a boat, so it was fine.  The young men walked out on the dock where I was sitting with the nice spider below, carrying their bowfishing rigs. They asked if we got any fish and I replied that we weren't fishing.  They fired into the black water a few times and then walked back up the dock.  They must have been puzzled by the two guys with the canoe and waders on at the boat ramp late at night "not fishing", because they stopped to ask what we were doing.  I'm not sure that our answer, "taking pictures of the stars", was what they were expecting.

Micah was planning to shoot from the dock and then from the observation deck to the west a bit later.  I loaded up and paddled out. The Canoe Trail was a fairly easy route to follow considering it is not a well-defined river with obvious banks (map here).  The main channel was mostly posted with signage and dotted with huge cypress trees and it was flanked by dense buttonbush, so you could mostly tell where to go.  That said, I wouldn't recommend that someone who doesn't have experience navigating in wetlands just take a stab at it without good maps and a GPS.  I had both, just in case.

My progress was slow.  Not because of inefficient paddling or navigation, but because I was enjoying the view so much.  I knew I had a bit of time until the shot of the state champion tree, so I was in no hurry with no worries.  I stopped and challenged myself.  I tried to take some pictures of the trees from the canoe without using the tripod.  I sat the waterproof camera case on my lap, shimmed the camera with the lens cap, and tried to hold still while also trying to keep the canoe from drifting.  These two photos are each 6-second exposures.  Not perfectly crisp, but I'd say not bad for 6 seconds in a canoe with a non-stabilized lens. 

To be fair, I held onto a branch for the second photo.  I back-paddled up to a cypress, reached up, and grabbed on.  A few seconds later, I remembered that cottonmouths sometimes perch in the buttonbush and cypress trees and I used my headlamp to settle my momentary unease. I also saw a cool shot of the moon reflecting through a hollowed-out buttress of a cypress tree, but I couldn't stabilize the canoe enough to pull that one off.  Maybe some other time when the water is lower. 

Then it was time to go meet the IL state champion bald cypress.  This tree is estimated to be over 1000 years "young" (they got an incomplete sample of 890 annual rings when they cored it). It is not the tallest or oldest cypress in the state (there's a larger one in the Cache, noted in the link above), but the champion was crowned using the sanctioned scoring method, which measures diameter a bit higher above the widest point of the buttressed bottom of these trees.  That "larger tree" tree is also surrounded by fairly dense forest canopy, so the champ also wins for the best view of the night sky!

Once I was close to the champion tree, I probed the water with the paddle from the canoe to check the depth.  It was "doable", so I took off my inflatable PFD.  I didn't want it to inflate if I accidentally dunked it in the water.  There was no graceful way to drop into the waist-deep (I'm 6'5") water from a canoe without someone to leverage the canoe in the other direction, so I simply got my legs over and went for it.  My feet hit mud before water hit my armpits and stayed dry.  I then got the tripod set up, forcing the legs into the mud to make it fairly solid.  I was glad again to have such a tall, sturdy tripod and insurance on my camera as I mounted the camera to the tripod and attached the remote. 

I got set up just in the nick of time, with the Milky Way high enough to clear the trees on the horizon but still low enough to not get caught up in the tree limbs.  

I was also grateful for the weather.  I had expected that I would spend the night alternating between triggering the remote and swatting mosquitoes, but it dropped from the 60s to the 50s during the trip and I only heard two mosquitoes early during this shot.  As I captured the 45 frames for this photo (3-frame panorama shot 15 times), I could hear a few bats clicking overhead (the streak continues!).  I hope they managed to find some bugs other than mosquitoes or else they'd be rather hungry.  I  could hear a truck driving and parking in the lot, so I knew Micah must be headed my way. 

As I turned to load the canoe, the moon was setting into the cypress and I just had to capture that surreal glow.  Then, I loaded up the gear and waded out a bit further into the open water to explore another possibility that came to mind as I watched the MW rise over the champ.

I had not planned the next shot, but once I saw the MW arching over the champ, I knew I just had to try to capture it.  As I set up, the arch got higher and higher and the moon sank lower and lower.  I was quickly losing my opportunity.  It was a real rush to get set up and start shooting, but it was fun stress.  I prioritized photographing the sky before the arch got too high, and within that, prioritized the champ before the moonglow turned to complete shadow.  Then I panned to either side.  After that, I shot the part below the tree.  

I had set up the lens warmer because it was cold, I was standing in a swamp, and I didn't want to risk having the lens fog part of the way through the panorama.  I regret doing so because as I panned, the cord pulled on the warmer causing it and the focus ring to turn. Luckily, after the very last shot, I checked the photo and realized it was out of focus.  I had to spend another 15 minutes reshooting the bottom half of this photo.  I think that I mostly salvaged it, but I still find some minor technical flaws in the photo and plan to go back on June 26th, give-or-take a day, to reshoot it.  I bet the mosquitoes won't be as docile then.

I was glad that nothing swam into me in the dark after the moonset.  I couldn't use my headlamp for fear of casting errant light on the scene, so there was only a bit of glow from the stars.  I would have shrieked if something harmless bumped into me.  Several times, bubbles reverberated under my soles as they popped free from the mud below and it caught my attention each time.

We have seen some spectacular shooting stars during these trips, but have yet to capture one with the camera.  During the panorama, a meteor streaked from the treetop down to the horizon on the left, right through the frame.  But, timing is everything.  The camera had just finished the last shot in a series about 2 seconds prior, so I only captured it in my mind. 

Micah hollered out to me from the observation platform while I was shooting the panorama to let me know that he was going to shoot some star trails from there while I wrapped up.  When the final shot was recorded, I had to figure out how to get back in the canoe.  I waded over to some buttonbush, jumped up, and flopped into the canoe.  Phew!

Micah hopped into the bow of the canoe and we headed toward Eagle Pond. There's a boat-wide cut through the buttonbush, then through a forest skirt of tall cypress trees, and ultimately into the open pond.  As we snaked through the narrow cut in the brush, my paddle sparked an eruption.  The water exploded!  A sizeable silver carp burst from the dark water and nailed Micah in the back!  It was flopping about under his seat, smacking him in the calves with its tail.  We decided to just keep paddling and deal with it later (invasive fish, so no concern if it died).  The canoe and all of our gear reeked of fish, even well after we had ejected the stowaway.

The motivation to head down to Eagle Pond was the aforementioned FB post.  In addition to the state champion cypress, he had also visited a cypress at Eagle Pond and it looked quite photogenic.  He told me that the pond lays east-west and the cypress is on the south side, so I knew we could get a nice clear shot of it looking toward the Milky Way.  This impressive tree is roughly 850 years "young", and has 209 knees, one of which is marked at 11'2" tall (you can see the sign in the center of the picture).  What I didn't anticipate was that the water in the "pond" was a bit deeper, so I could not get out where I had planned to for the photo. 

Several soundings with the paddles convinced me that I wasn't going to get out of the canoe at the vantage point I had anticipated.  We paddled the canoe into the fortress of cypress knees and I got out there.  I probed the depths with a paddle in one hand while my other arm was leveraged on the canoe to take some weight off my feet as I slowly waded out from the knees.  It was precarious!  Seriously, I was on my tiptoes at several points and without the canoe making me lighter, I definitely would have sunk into the mud and topped my waders. I just kept going one step further and looking back to see where the MW was relative to the trees until it fell into a narrow gap.

Micah's a great friend and he was very patient with me.  We had planned that he would drop me off and go shoot pictures from shore, but I asked if he would stay.  I knew that one wrong step and my waders would be full and I'd be swimming to the knees for safety.  He hung tight, handing me gear as I assembled the setup.  Then, he drifted back a little bit out-of-frame and helped by using his batteries-dying-more-by-the-second headlamp to "light paint" the tree and its knees, which was also a huge help.  At one point, the paddle that I had jammed down into the mud for support popped free and drifted into the frame.  I was not eager to go get it, but I knew it would ruin the shot.  It took 4 steps to get to it.  The 3rd was enough for the water to overtop my waders for an instant.  I was wet, but not soaked.  Totally worth it for this shot!

Micah paddled back over and escorted me back to the cypress knees so I could get back into the canoe.  There were many cool looking snails on the knees, but I didn't get the little camera out for the little critters.

I thanked Micah for his patience and help.  I told him that it was his turn, so we headed to the north shore of the pond.  He only had knee boots and his camera isn't insured, so he wanted to set up on land.  His plan was to use a spotlight to illuminate the south shore from across the pond.  Unfortunately, the water near the shoreline was skirted by buttonbush and cypress.  We tried to walk on shore a ways to see if we could find a window to shoot through, but the vegetation was thick on shore too.  We hadn't come prepared for a hike (carrying bulky, waterproof camera cases) and I feared that the waist-deep carpet of greenbrier was going to turn my waders into leakers.  We retreated to the canoe and photographed this spider once there.

We paddled along the shoreline to look for other opportunities.  I had noticed a nice treeline on the paddle in, but the MW was not lined up properly when we came in.  I figured it should be getting pretty well aligned by this time, and it was!  The only shot would have to be from the water again, and Micah obliged, letting me hop out one last time.  I had to step out onto the buttress of a cypress because it was rather deep again.  Evaporative fog was forming over the pond now and the slightest breeze was causing it to converge as it drifted away from me, making for a really interesting foreground. 

Then it was time for my most precarious canoe mount of the night, climbing up on a fallen branch full of spider webs.  I made another solid entry and we headed back to the ramp. Another carp burst from the water as we paddled out through the narrow cut.  This time, the carp launched itself into a forked branch, catching its gill plates and getting hung out to dry for a few seconds before shaking free.

The paddle back was glorious.  The dark had already transitioned to "blue hour" and was now shifting to light touches of golden light. We both agreed that we could spend another hour photographing the dawn and get some great photos.  We also both agreed that we were tired and that a dawn photo session would be fitting for a morning that didn't follow an all-nighter. We heard wood ducks, Canada geese, beaver, kites, and plenty of "tweety birds" (my nickname for passerines).  Every valley on the drive home had streaks of golden light and soft fog.  Again, we saw plenty of picture-worthy scenes. Again, we knew that would have to be for another morning.

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For anyone interested in doing the trip, if you do not have paddle craft, or would just feel more comfortable with a guide, check out Cache Bayou Outfitters, a non-profit that seeks to promote and educate folks on the ecology and historical ways of life in the region.  They have affordable tours and rentals available and I have heard great reviews.  They also occasionally offer full-moon paddle tours!  A full moon isn't the best time to see the Milky Way, but it's a great time to paddle among the cypress shadows and see more critters.