Leapfrog 2 Arch is an arch that, to the best of my knowledge, had never been properly documented until I took this image. The arch is located on a shelf about 15-20 feet up the cliffside. There really isn’t a great way to get up to the top of it, so I ended up having to improvise a bit.
A slew of newly (re) discovered arches in the Laurel County portions of the Daniel Boone National Forest were recently submitted to the Kentucky Arch Database. Not only did the locations of these arches need to be confirmed for the sake of the integrity of the database, but there was some discrepancies with the location of one of the submitted natural bridges. I decided to set off into the forest to solve the mystery once and for all!
It’s finally time for another adventure! This time around I decided to get out into the Gorge to enjoy some of the fall colors and to hunt for some new to me arches.
It has been several years now since I’ve first laid eyes on the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. Ever since that first trip to Dolly Sods I have been in love with the area’s scenery. I’ve been itching to get back to the area for some time now, so I decided to head on out to Dolly Sods and Spruce Knob for a bit of photography!
Over the past few months, I have spent a fair bit of time out on Auxier Ridge in the Red River Gorge portion of Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest. Despite the area featuring some of the best views in the entire Bluegrass, I rarely spend this much time out there during the warmer months since it’s quite the popular area. This year, however, has been an exception.
Something I haven’t done a whole lot of is exploring and photographing abandoned buildings, an activity often referred to as urban exploring or urbex. It’s a subject that has always interested me, I just haven’t had much chance to practice it myself. As such, I jumped on board when I was invited to go explore an abandoned high school with some friends.
I got 2019 started off right by going to check out two spots in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge that looked curious on LiDAR. In fact, they looked an awful lot like waterfalls! This trip resulted in us documenting two new waterfalls in the Red River Gorge.
If you haven’t noticed yet, I have a minor obsession with visiting and photographing waterfalls. To be honest, it could probably be classified as a sickness at this point! As such, I recently went to scout out some of the off-trail waterfalls in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park.
During my last trip to The Great Smoky Mountains, I decided that I wanted to night hike up Mt. Leconte to Myrtle Point to attempt to photograph the sunrise. This is a trip I’ve been trying to do for several months, but the weather has never been particularly cooperative!
It has been a few weeks now since my last trip to the Great Smoky Mountains, but I’d like to take a moment to share the trip with you.
We’ve been in the midst of a deep freeze here in the Bluegrass state, and that has meant that the waterfalls across Kentucky have been freezing. Copperas Falls in the Red River Gorge portion of the Daniel Boone National Forest was certainly no exception! For weeks I had been seeing hints online that the falls off Copperas Creek had frozen to the point of being a solid pillar of ice. Some were even suggesting that it’s the most the falls have frozen in several years. This was just too good of an opportunity to pass up! I messaged @Brian2774 on Instagram and we made plans to head out to the falls shortly after daybreak on Saturday morning.
I’d been obsessively checking the weather reports for weeks in advance. It looked like I was finally going to have a weather window to get the sunrise shot I’d been envisioning. The plan was relatively straightforward. I’d drive down to the Great Smoky Mountains on Friday and get on the trail up to the summit of Mt. Leconte no later than 3 a.m. on Saturday. Then I’d simply wait around and photograph the sunrise from Myrtle Point. How hard could it be?