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canyonwalkerOhio Waterfalls Travelog #17
Hocking Hills State Park · Sun, 19 Apr 2026. 12pm
It's time to catch up on delayed blogs from our Ohio trip earlier this week! This is the first of probably seven in the backlog.
Our hiking yesterday (Saturday) was a matter of, "How many hikes can we do before it starts to rain?" The answer was three. But the answer was also and it's gloomy the whole time. While we were doing the hikes I thought to myself, "Some of these dry-ish waterfalls would look better right after the rain vs. before it." Well, today that opportunity came around! In addition to raining yesterday afternoon it rained again before dawn this morning. So this morning (Sunday) we went back to one of yesterday's dry-ish falls to see it again in the wet!
First up today: Ash Cave. Recall from yesterday, there's a short, easy trail up the bottom of the gorge. It leads straight to this huge cave. Yes, this is a "cave" in Ohio terminology. I'd call it more of a hollow. But it is darn large, at over 90' tall.
And yes, a creek pours over the lip of the cave/hollow, creating a beautiful 90' waterfall. It's flowing a bit more today than yesterday though not by much. I guess either a prolonged rain is needed to make it fuller, or one needs to catch it sooner after the rain stops.
Does this picture, above, look similar to the one before it? That's kind of on purpose. I made the latter picture with my Fujifilm X-T3 interchangeable lens camera, the former with the built-in camera on my iPhone 16 Pro. What's the difference? I welcome you to make your own observations; here are a few of mine.
Then there's this picture:
As we climbed around the trail that leads behind the falls and up the other side of the cave, we stopped to rest a while at a bench. While Hawk sat for her rest, I stood the whole time for mine, making pictures. Yes, photography is how I rest when I'm hiking. 😂 I thought that I'd get the best pics from this vantage point with my Fuji camera, but instead the one I liked best, which I'm showing here, is from my iPhone. Why? The computational photography = dynamic range advantage won.
From here, instead of going back down to the gorge trail and retracing our steps out, we continued up around the ridge of the canyon. From this point we were over half way up the climb already so we figured why not finish it. 🤣 Alas, while it was a different stretch of trail, the views were not as good from the tree-lined ridge as they were from the creek below.
Hocking Hills State Park · Sun, 19 Apr 2026. 12pm
It's time to catch up on delayed blogs from our Ohio trip earlier this week! This is the first of probably seven in the backlog.
Our hiking yesterday (Saturday) was a matter of, "How many hikes can we do before it starts to rain?" The answer was three. But the answer was also and it's gloomy the whole time. While we were doing the hikes I thought to myself, "Some of these dry-ish waterfalls would look better right after the rain vs. before it." Well, today that opportunity came around! In addition to raining yesterday afternoon it rained again before dawn this morning. So this morning (Sunday) we went back to one of yesterday's dry-ish falls to see it again in the wet!
First up today: Ash Cave. Recall from yesterday, there's a short, easy trail up the bottom of the gorge. It leads straight to this huge cave. Yes, this is a "cave" in Ohio terminology. I'd call it more of a hollow. But it is darn large, at over 90' tall.
And yes, a creek pours over the lip of the cave/hollow, creating a beautiful 90' waterfall. It's flowing a bit more today than yesterday though not by much. I guess either a prolonged rain is needed to make it fuller, or one needs to catch it sooner after the rain stops.
Does this picture, above, look similar to the one before it? That's kind of on purpose. I made the latter picture with my Fujifilm X-T3 interchangeable lens camera, the former with the built-in camera on my iPhone 16 Pro. What's the difference? I welcome you to make your own observations; here are a few of mine.
- It used to be that my Fuji would take a way better picture, much richer in color, than my iPhone. That still happens in some situations, but fewer and fewer with each new generation of camera in the iPhone.
- One big difference in favor of the Fuji is that I have strong creative control over the picture captured by the camera. I used a neutral density lens filter to capture a long-exposure picture that creates that silky, motion-blur effect on the falling water (latter pic). The tradeoff of purposefully allowing motion blur, though, is that the trees in the background get blurry because they're waving in the breeze.
- One area where modern cellphone cameras excel is in computational photography. They use their powerful onboard processors to capture and combine multiple exposures at different gain levels to create a single image with superior dynamic range. You can see that in how the shadows of the cave are brighter and the sky overhead is blue, not washed-out white, in the iPhone image.
Then there's this picture:
As we climbed around the trail that leads behind the falls and up the other side of the cave, we stopped to rest a while at a bench. While Hawk sat for her rest, I stood the whole time for mine, making pictures. Yes, photography is how I rest when I'm hiking. 😂 I thought that I'd get the best pics from this vantage point with my Fuji camera, but instead the one I liked best, which I'm showing here, is from my iPhone. Why? The computational photography = dynamic range advantage won.
From here, instead of going back down to the gorge trail and retracing our steps out, we continued up around the ridge of the canyon. From this point we were over half way up the climb already so we figured why not finish it. 🤣 Alas, while it was a different stretch of trail, the views were not as good from the tree-lined ridge as they were from the creek below.
