Cathedral Falls
Sep. 19th, 2023 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerWest Virginia Travelog #8
Gauley Bridge, WV - Sun, 17 Sep 2023. 1pm
After deciding we could do more in the inclement weather than watch it from the window of our hotel room we gathered our gear and headed out. Cathedral Falls was our first stop. ...Well, okay, grabbing a light lunch was my first stop. Then we stopped at Cathedral Falls. 😅
Would fighting through the gloom lead us to something beautiful? The signs were not positive. And by "signs" I mean West Virginia highway road signs.
Absolutely nothing here. 😰 There were a lot of signs like this.
Fortunately we knew where to go. Near the tiny town of Gauley Bridge there was a small, signed turnout for Cathedral Falls.
As promised by the hiking website we checked, the falls is visible from the road. ...Well, maybe not from the road, but definitely from the small parking lot next to it.
As you can see in the photo, we were not the only ones with the idea, "Weather sucks? Let's go hiking!" There were half a dozen other cars at the small parking lot and people crawling up and down the short trail. Well, "trail" is an ambitious word. It was more like a route over the rain-soaked rocks. We came prepared for it, with boots, so we strode up the trail, climbing directly up the rock ledges in the stream bed, where others were picking their ways carefully.
The thing about crowds is that there's usually a lull in them. We bided our time near the falls— not that that was in any way a hardship!— waiting for our opportunity. It came. While the small parking lot remained full, not everybody was interested in scrambling to the back of the canyon.
I made the photo above with the help of my tripod. Yes, I took it on this trip. Yes, I carried in the rain. Yes, it was worth it! With the tripod I can take slow exposures, capturing the motion blur of the falling water while rendering everything else fairly sharply. This one's almost a full second long. Also, even if I weren't taking a slow exposure, using the tripod allows me to compose the picture the way I want to instead of trusting a helpful stranger to understand picture composition. (Hint: almost no helpful stranger understands picture composition, including those carrying thousands of dollars of picture-taking equipment. One of my first experiences in outdoors photograph years ago was money ≠ skill.)
Gauley Bridge, WV - Sun, 17 Sep 2023. 1pm
After deciding we could do more in the inclement weather than watch it from the window of our hotel room we gathered our gear and headed out. Cathedral Falls was our first stop. ...Well, okay, grabbing a light lunch was my first stop. Then we stopped at Cathedral Falls. 😅
Would fighting through the gloom lead us to something beautiful? The signs were not positive. And by "signs" I mean West Virginia highway road signs.
Absolutely nothing here. 😰 There were a lot of signs like this.
Fortunately we knew where to go. Near the tiny town of Gauley Bridge there was a small, signed turnout for Cathedral Falls.
As promised by the hiking website we checked, the falls is visible from the road. ...Well, maybe not from the road, but definitely from the small parking lot next to it.
As you can see in the photo, we were not the only ones with the idea, "Weather sucks? Let's go hiking!" There were half a dozen other cars at the small parking lot and people crawling up and down the short trail. Well, "trail" is an ambitious word. It was more like a route over the rain-soaked rocks. We came prepared for it, with boots, so we strode up the trail, climbing directly up the rock ledges in the stream bed, where others were picking their ways carefully.
The thing about crowds is that there's usually a lull in them. We bided our time near the falls— not that that was in any way a hardship!— waiting for our opportunity. It came. While the small parking lot remained full, not everybody was interested in scrambling to the back of the canyon.
I made the photo above with the help of my tripod. Yes, I took it on this trip. Yes, I carried in the rain. Yes, it was worth it! With the tripod I can take slow exposures, capturing the motion blur of the falling water while rendering everything else fairly sharply. This one's almost a full second long. Also, even if I weren't taking a slow exposure, using the tripod allows me to compose the picture the way I want to instead of trusting a helpful stranger to understand picture composition. (Hint: almost no helpful stranger understands picture composition, including those carrying thousands of dollars of picture-taking equipment. One of my first experiences in outdoors photograph years ago was money ≠ skill.)
