GPS Coordinates: (Latitude, Longitude, Elevation)
Park for Blanchard Springs: 35.95889, -92.17539, 439 ft.
Blanchard Springs: 35.95860, -92.17740, 483 ft.
Mirror Lake: 35.96349, -92.17094, 416 ft.
Gunner Pool: 35.99507 -92.21349, 461 ft.
Pet Friendly: Yes; dogs on or off leash will be fine, just not in the cave. This is a National Forest Service recreation area, and other people will probably be around. If your dog isn't well behaved around other folks, I recommend keeping it on a leash.
Motorcycle Friendly: Yes; there are well-paved roads right to the visitor center, as well as parking locations for Mirror Lake, Blanchard Springs, and along Sylamore Creek toward the campground area.
From below the spillway, we avoided most of the fog and the cloud cover was starting to break up, allowing us to get some photos of the night sky above the waterfall. We really didn't know what to expect for light painting needs, so we had taken a variety of lights with us, from a big LED floodlight to a small penlight. Bethany did all the light painting and ended up using one of the smaller penlights for a three-second to a four-second sweep of the area we wanted to be lit up during the exposure. Most of the exposures I took were 20 seconds, which I determined by trial and error to be about the most I could push it without getting any elongation of the stars, "star trails" caused by the earth rotating during the exposure. We took almost 300 shots over the night.
Many required of the same shot, adjusting our light painting or exposure. We would take the shot with light painting, then adjust for an area that was too brightly lit, or one that was too dark. Bethany was a real trooper, and adapted to my lighting needs very quickly.
By the time the cloud cover lifted and we had mostly clear skies, the fog also was lifting. We hiked back up to the top of the spillway and got a few shots, and finally got rid of the clouds and fog when the Milky Way was really showing. I didn't get the early shots of the Milky Way rising in the east that I had planned, but we did end up with some really good ones. We had to go back and forth from the top to the base of the waterfall to catch the Milky Way in the right space over the subject, but it's a short enough hike and didn't take that much time. We ended up spending all night at Mirror Lake and never had time to go to the other location we scouted by the picnic area. Bethany got pretty good at hanging over the rail and light painting the waterfall while we were at the top of the spillway, so I was able to get some good shots of the upper section of the waterfall and the surface of the lake, with the Milky Way standing up at the end of the lake.
After hiking the area to scout locations in the drizzly rain, we hiked around and photographed the Mirror Lake area at night from about 10:00pm until 3:30am. We should have been bone tired, but I was so excited I couldn't sleep when we eventually got done and headed back to the cabin. I know I'm new at this and have a lot to learn, both in the night photography arena and in post-processing the photos. This little adventure was not only a heck of a lot of fun, I learned an enormous amount from experimentation. Looking back at it, and looking at the photos, there are many things I now know to do and am already planning a return visit. I don't really have the patience of some of my photographer friends to take multiple shots that I can stitch and stack to remove noise and enhance visibility, but I now know that there is a whole lot I can do with "one-shot" photos to look really spectacular.
All in all, this was one of the more fun hiking adventures I've had. We didn't take Boomer, because keeping track of a solid black German Shepherd at night would have just consumed too much of our time. I did get to spend all day and all night out in a spectacular area with the love of my life, learning and marveling at the beautiful vistas we had all to ourselves. Well, after dark we had the whole place to ourselves, anyway. I'll be going back, and I now have a lot more tools in my bag of tricks to try. On future hikes, I plan on using PhotoPills to scout for suitable night photography shots. I'll save those plans for my use, and if my readers find value in them, I'll share them on the blog posts. Looking forward to the next one!
Hiking Statistics: We did a number of short hikes today, all of them easy, on some of the best trails you will find. Hikes to either Blanchard Springs or the base of Mirror Lake are only about a quarter mile each. We ended up hiking around 10 miles total between all the spots we scouted during the day and the actual hikes at night. For the duration of our night adventure, we parked at the spillway on Mirror Lake and made the trip down the boardwalk and back upstream to the base of Mirror Lake Falls, then up to the top, three times. It's about a mile round trip each time. We also went out on the trail along Mirror Lake's shore for a few shots.
Related Blog posts:
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| Mirror Lake Falls with Milky Way in the background (light painting by Bethany) |
Night photography? Is this a hiking blog, or what? Well, yes. Yes, it is. As we found out, if you go out shooting the milky way at night you are likely to get in a good deal of hiking. The thing is, I'm more of a hiker than a photographer. But I like to hike because (A) it's pretty good exercise, and (2) I love the outdoors and enjoy the natural beauty of this fabulous area we are lucky to live in. So naturally, you want something to look at and remind you of just how majestic and beautiful the waterfalls, caves, and vistas can be. My theory is that every avid hiker either is an avid photographer or they will certainly become one if they keep hiking. Since they do go hand in hand, I decided to write up a special edition of the blog to cover this trip, and my lessons learned in nighttime hiking and photography.
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| Mirror Lake Falls, beautiful by day or night |
I am literally a newbie at night photography. My wife, Bethany, gave me a gift certificate for one of Tim Ernst's workshops, and it was only last week that I finally used that on one of his night photography workshops. This workshop is highly recommended, by the way. I came back with some great photos and learned a lot of stuff, much of which I would never have figured out on my own. Having one of the best nature photographers in the world at your beck and call from sunset to sunrise to answer all your silly questions is a huge plus as well. Now I was completely fired up about going out and shooting some waterfalls with a backdrop of the Milky Way, the holy grail of night photography.
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| Ruins of the old mill Mirror Lake Falls visible through window |
Unfortunately, as I found out, it isn't as simple as taking the same photo of a waterfall after the sun sets. The Milky Way is only visible in the southern sky, and the core of the galactic center is only at it's best for us in the northern hemisphere for a couple of months in the summer because of the earth's tilt. Add to that the fact that the light cast by the moon can completely obliterate the light from distant stars, so you don't want to be shooting when there is any moonlight during the night. So these were my selection criteria:
1) Pretty waterfall, with a north face.
2) View of the night sky, visible behind the waterfall, and not blocked by bluffs or foliage.
3) Waterfall with good flow in July.
4) Within a few days of a new moon.
5) Far enough from towns that light pollution was not a big factor.
Of course, you also need a cloudless sky, but that is just something you hope for after you select a suitable location.  |
| PhotoPills Planner for Mirror Lake |
There are only a handful of waterfalls, out of the hundreds I have seen in the Ozarks, that fit the location criteria. Of those, I figured Mirror Lake would be the only one with good flow. The huge caverns here have a river in the lower cave system that is fed from a vast aquifer. The river flows out of the ground at Blanchard Springs Falls and the short creek started there flows into Mirror Lake. Wherever the water comes from, it seems to have plenty to last through any dry spell and provide good flow year round over the waterfall. Bethany and I had already planned a couple of days away at some good friend's cabin, which happened to be only 9 miles from Blanchard Springs Recreation Area. We had planned to go up there on July 16, which was only four days after a new moon so the moon would be set for almost the entire night. It happened kind of by accident, but my plan was coming together. So this morning Bethany and I headed towards Blanchard Springs.
One of the things I had determined a couple of nights earlier was that you really have to go check out locations in the daytime before attempting to shoot at night. I had the great idea of using the old trestle bridge across Big Piney near Fort Douglas as my subject, with the Milky Way rising behind it. Stumbling around in the dark with just a headlamp on, I nearly fell off a bluff into a pool on the creek. I also took out many, many cobwebs with my face, not a pleasant experience. So today, we got to the cabin and dropped off our bags. We then went to Blanchard Springs to scout suitable areas for night photography. I use an app call PhotoPills on my phone to help with planning, and it has a "Night Augmented Reality" feature to overlay the image on the camera with what will be showing in the night sky at a specific time. It is really indispensable for planning Milky Way shots.
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| Blanchard Springs Falls today This location was completely obscured from the night sky by terrain and foliage. |
After a few hours slogging around at various locations, we found very few spots that had a good view of the night sky where the Milky Way would come into view. Blanchard Springs Falls and the bridges along the creek downstream of it were completely blocked by terrain and foliage. We did find a spot near the shelter cave picnic area along Sylamore Creek that would have worked if we light-painted a small bluff. Fortunately, Mirror Lake was a prime location, both at the base of the waterfall and on the north and west sides. As an added bonus, the mountain to the east of Mirror Lake blocked out any light pollution from Mountain View, which was the only nearby town of any size. Looking down toward the end of Mirror Lake from the spillway, you are looking in a direction with a dark sky and no light pollution for about 80 miles (Russellville).
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| Mirror Lake Falls Still significant cloud cover and no Milky Way |
After spending the day scouting for good night shot locations and enjoying the awesome scenery in the area, we went back for a good dinner at Angler's and a couple hours rest at the cabin before heading out for our night photography adventure. It had been completely overcast and drizzly rain for most of the day, so I was a little apprehensive about our chances for a clear night sky. Sure enough, when we got to Mirror Lake it had stopped raining but was still very overcast. We had identified specific times the Milky Way would be visible from various spots on Mirror Lake and went to the spillway for our first setup. We decided that instead of driving from the spillway to the bottom of the boardwalk, we would just park at the spillway and hike down the boardwalk and then up the trail to the base of the falls.
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| Fog over Mirror Lake |
Initially, it appeared that the night and the weather were not going to cooperate with us at all. There was not only significant cloud cover, but a heavy fog rolled down the creek and blanketed the area above the dam. This was the first time I had attempted light painting, a technique by which you shine a light on ground objects you want to be illuminated during the long exposure you take to get a good shot of the stars. The fog simply reflected the light right back at the camera, making for shots that were just one big blowout. We played with the camera setup and experimented to develop our light painting skills, and eventually got a couple of cool photos. We hiked down to the base of the falls to see if we might get some usable shots from that angle. We ended up going back and forth three times, so we did get a little exercise in. Using LED headlamps, we lit up enough of the trail ahead of us that we could hike safely.
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| Mirror Lake and upper part of waterfall today |
From below the spillway, we avoided most of the fog and the cloud cover was starting to break up, allowing us to get some photos of the night sky above the waterfall. We really didn't know what to expect for light painting needs, so we had taken a variety of lights with us, from a big LED floodlight to a small penlight. Bethany did all the light painting and ended up using one of the smaller penlights for a three-second to a four-second sweep of the area we wanted to be lit up during the exposure. Most of the exposures I took were 20 seconds, which I determined by trial and error to be about the most I could push it without getting any elongation of the stars, "star trails" caused by the earth rotating during the exposure. We took almost 300 shots over the night.
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| Mirror Lake and upper waterfall with Milky Way. The large bright object above the horizon on the left is Mars |
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| Milky Way over Mirror Lake and Mars on the left |
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| Mirror Lake Falls and Milky Way |
All in all, this was one of the more fun hiking adventures I've had. We didn't take Boomer, because keeping track of a solid black German Shepherd at night would have just consumed too much of our time. I did get to spend all day and all night out in a spectacular area with the love of my life, learning and marveling at the beautiful vistas we had all to ourselves. Well, after dark we had the whole place to ourselves, anyway. I'll be going back, and I now have a lot more tools in my bag of tricks to try. On future hikes, I plan on using PhotoPills to scout for suitable night photography shots. I'll save those plans for my use, and if my readers find value in them, I'll share them on the blog posts. Looking forward to the next one!
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