Category: West Virginia

Dolly Sods

Getting up to, and down from, Dolly Sods in West Virginia is a slow rough trip over a very rocky road.  The roads are steep and the rains wash out the soil leaving the rocks protruding so that your vehicle tires have to keep running over rough rocks.  It makes for a very bumpy ride.  The trip had me missing my older four wheel raised pickup truck with ten-inch clearance and sturdier tires.  Fortunately we didn’t have any trouble but when I stopped on top near a pickup truck, the truck driver asked me if I had any wire or a metal coat hanger.  I didn’t.  His tail pipe had vibrated loose, or was knocked loose, and was dragging the ground and he needed to tie it up.

West Virginia Mountains

We went to West Virginia to see the leaf colors and visit some of our old haunts:  Blackwater Falls and Canaan Valley State Parks, Dolly Sods, and Seneca Rocks.  The leaves were at peak colors on the higher elevations, but in general they are duller this year.

Edward Brunswick Holmes House

 This is a picture of the house where my grandparents and two aunts lived when I was young.  Some of my first pictures were made in that house and from the front porch; but, I didn’t take the above picture.  My brother captured it right before the house was torn down.

The following picture, made by me sometime around 1958 inside the front room of the house, shows my grandfather, grandmother, father, and brother.

Blackwater Falls & Sled Run

210612-132055-JEH21-EnhancedA view of Blackwater Falls from the Gentle Trail overlook.

The following two images are of the sled run and the conveyer belt that takes you and your sled up to the top.  It is a nice long sled run with a no-effort trip to the top so you can go back down again.  They have improved the experience.  The last time I was there they had an old truck at the top with a winch to pull a rope up the hill while you held onto the rope.

Beauty or Not?

When I originally photographed scenes in WV I was hoping that they would make good monochrome images.  Some of them have worked for monochrome, but maybe some have not.  Since the scenes contain such complex compositions of browns and greens, different things are lost or amplified when viewing them in monochrome.  Personally I could go with monochrome, but I imagine most would prefer color.

There is more “beauty” in the color renditions, but if the message is the randomness of the ecology of the woods, the decay, the complexity of death, etc., the monochrome images portray a different “story” from the color ones.

Or is that I don’t see much “beauty” in the world, especially as I look forward into the future.

WVa

I probably will publish some individual images made while walking in the woods in Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia.  I’m still wondering how to title them and I haven’t decided whether to just use them to illustrate posts about various subjects or to just show pictures with little to no text.

Lindy Point

 I made these on the walk out to Lindy Point in Blackwater State Park in WVa.  I tried to show some different images than what you often see in advertisements for West Virginia.  Note the Blackwater River in the valley, the rattlesnake on the rocks out at the point, my brother, etc.