For the last 3 years I have been saying that I was going to. I have spent over $1,000 on equipment that I haven’t used. I’ve accrued sufficient paid time off and lost it … twice. But this weekend, I packed up my cameras, filled my car with outdoor gear and I traveled to Letchworth State Park for my first-ever solo photography excursion.
Letchworth was a very pragmatic choice. First, it is beautiful. It is only 2.5 hours away, so I could get back forth quickly and not spend too much time in the car for what would ultimately only be a 36-hour trip. There are 2 Walmarts within 20 minutes of the park, so I could easily find any essential items that I had failed to pack. Lastly, the park is heavily trafficked on foot so I wouldn’t get lost while I learned how to use my GPS app on the phone.
I decided at the last minute that I was going to go, so was looking for a campsite only 36 hours before I was hoping to leave. For convenience, I looked at the Letchworth sites, but they were all booked, which was okay with me; I had been planning on trying to find a site through HipCamp anyway. There had been a few places that I had scouted early in the week, and while my first choice had since been booked, there was still a site that was only 10 minutes from the park and the property owner was agreeable to me staying there.
I would spend 2.5 hours trying to pack the car Friday morning. I had practiced packing it earlier in the summer, but that had been with a grill instead of a stove (which I had decided was going to be my efficient means of cooking/warming food after a positive experience tailgating with Austin in Watkins Glen). Despite me packing, unpacking, and re-packing the car over and over again, I ultimately landed on the same configuration that I developed earlier in the summer. Unfortunately, once I have all the gear in the vehicle, it is PACKED (both literally and figuratively). It is clear: if anyone ever wants to go with me, I am going to need a roof rack.
So what did I bring? Screened canopy with removable walls, clothesline, and clothespins. Camp chair. 2 folding camping tables. Camp stove with cast iron griddle. Collapsing buckets and was bin. Collapsable outhouse/shower/changing area with folding stool, TP, urinal, and poop bucket. 8 gallons of water. Tent cot with inflatable mattresses, sleeping bags, bag liner, and pillow. Cooler with beer, food, and condiments. 4 tiki torches. Kitchen supplies including plates, utensils, spatula tongs, napkins, pot/lid, and mugs. Camera gear including messenger-style and hiking packs, both camera bodies, extra batteries with a USB charging dock, nearly all my lenses (fisheye, 14-150, 75-300, 25 1.8, 17 1.8), and a tripod. A backpack with my change of clothes. Toiletry bag with deodorant, meds, and shaver. Miscellaneous items included multi-use soap, flashlight and head lamp with extra batteries, trowel/TP, 2 battery banks (6000 and 20000 mA) with USB charging cables, DC to AC converter, garbage bags, bug spray and bug net, sunscreen, nitrile gloves, washcloth and towel. In the end I had only failed to pack one thing (details to follow).
The ride to the site was easy enough and I was camp was setup a mere 30 minutes after I arrived. The site was VERY secluded. I drove onto a dirt road, then made a turn onto the property, then slowly drove 2 minutes along a path on the property before arriving to the site. While the setup was quick, it wasn’t without it fair share of distracting and swarming bugs, but I was prepared, slipped on my bug net and got to work in short order. After a quick call to the family, I was on my way to the park with hopes of scouting for the next morning.
It was a beautiful evening with clear skies and a comfortable temperatures. I made my way through the park and got a lay of the land, noting where to park and where I wanted to stand for the best compositions and views of some of the most favorable views in the park. Bear in mind, there are few images in the park that haven’t already been captured thousands (if not millions) of times by someone else, and the summer colors were still on the trees, so this was a chance to capture nice images, but (like the trip to Acadia last year) I had no intentions of walking away with novel or unique images.
Because the skies were so clear, I was not in a hurry to try to capture an image of the upper falls and the railroad bridge; the sky comprises much of the frame, so some interesting clouds would be ideal. No, on this evening, I elected to go to Inspiration Point first, where I captured a few images that weren’t doing it for me, so I decided to travel down to the bridge after all so that I could try to capture an image of a train traveling on the tracks.
When arrived to the parking area, I noticed that a hot air balloon was being prepped for launch, and I knew that the best place to capture an image (if the wind were to be blowing in the right direction) was from Inspiration Point, so I returned to where I had been only 10 minutes earlier and waited 30-40 minutes for the balloons to launch. Yep, there were not just one, but two balloons that I hoped to capture as they traveled across the canyon/gorge.
The winds were not so kind, however, and the first balloon was picked up by the wind and carried out of frame and to the west. Fortunately, the second ball floated into frame and nearly over the river before being caught by the same winds and guided out of frame to my right. Having had ample time to prepare, however, I was able to capture a series of images as the balloon initially moved left, then up, then to the right. From the group, I was able to select one capture that I think works nicely and is well-balanced.
After the balloon was gone, I moved north a short distance to photograph a small cascade of water at Wolf Creek with a stone bridge in the background. Ideally, I would have preferred to be standing in the creek and a little farther back with a longer lens, compressing the scene more than I was able to with my positioning as it was. But I am committed to leaving no trace and only standing where I am supposed to, so this was the best image that I could get under the circumstances. This is yet another image that is probably a dime-a-dozen, but I like it, because I haven’t seen this image before (unlike many of the other scenes that I would photograph this weekend.
With a little bit of daylight left, I went back through the park and stopped at the parking area between the upper and middle falls with intentions of scouting for a time later the next day. And of course, wouldn’t you know it? The train went by! I quickly grabbed my camera, focused, and … captured a moving train with a slow shutter speed that had been set for the flowing water in low light. I quickly boosted my ISO and continued to capture frames of the train on the tracks, but they couldn’t be good enough without the engine.
I walked away disappointed with the train still moving. “Maybe tomorrow,” I thought to myself. Only the next day did it occur to me that I should have waited it out to see if there was an engine on the back of the train as well. If it were to have had an engine on the back, I could have made an image of the back end of the train with the engine “in tow” and it would have looked the same in the picture as an engine that had been in the lead. Oh well … in the end, the sky was very, very clear and the image wouldn’t have been something to hang a wall anyway.
After returning to camp, I “took a shower”. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but I was a hot and sticky mess so needed to do something before jumping into my bedding later that night. I had a sprinkler attachment that I could put on a water bottle, but elected to fill one bucket with “soap water” and another with “rinse water”. I entered the shower with a garbage bag with clean clothes, took off the dirty clothes, and proceeded to give myself a standing sponge bath which proved to ultimately be both effective and an more efficient use of water than the sprinkler bottle would have been. The only problem? I left the towel in the car.
Good thing there were no other campers on the property, because I stepped out of the shower and walked to the car naked before opening the trunk of the car and finding the towel that I needed to wrap around myself. I returned to the shower space to dry off without bugs getting to me and to practice getting dressed in the small space. In the end, the easiest way to get dressed was to sit down on the toilet stool and get dressed as much as possible in sitting before standing to pull up my lower body clothing. After the shower, I hung up my clothing, towel, and wash cloth on the clothesline I had tied to the frame of the canopy.
I need to develop a better clothesline solution though, because there isn’t a good way to tie the line to the screened canopy as there is the larger un-screened canopy that I own. Sometimes I will be at a space where I can just tie the line to a tree, but I prefer to have a solution that more effectively keeps the clothing from being exposed to the morning dew.
Dinner went as well as I had expected. Before leaving for the weekend, I had pre-cooked some chicken tenderloins and potato pancakes, so I only needed to season and warm-up the cast-iron griddle and warm-up the food. I placed the chicken in a foil packet and placed the potatoes directly on the griddle. The chicken took longer to heat up that I would like; I need to come up with a lid-solution to help keep some of the heat that is available to surround the chicken, I think. Even so, dinner was good and hot.
I planned to get up early in the morning to be at the park before sunrise, so I tried to be in bed by 1100. As I was getting ready for sleep, I was surprised to see that there was a large cloud to south when the forecast had predicted mostly clear skies. I was fortunate that my site has cellular coverage, so I quickly took a peak at the radar to discover that a small but intense thunderstorm was heading my way. Five minutes later, the walls were up on the canopy and the rain fly was on the tent.
I then proceeded to get my bedding ready. This was a mistake that I won’t make again. First, I should have put the bedding together outside the tent, not inside it. Second, I should have done it in the daylight. Of course, when the bugs were out earlier in the day, it seemed like a wiser choice to wait until later, but that turned out to be a short-sighted decision when I couldn’t get the liner to settle into the bag well and I struggled to get everything centered and positioned on the air mattress.
It took nearly 2 hours to finally fall asleep after the rain passed (I could hear the thunder, but the lightning was to my south); I would wake up on-and-off throughout the night until my alarm went off at 0500.
My hope Saturday morning was for fog in canyon/gorge. I have seen a number of pictures taken from the west side of the canyon looking down to the river and they look spectacular. The night before, I had determined that – while there are a handful of locations that allow for a view similar to what I was hoping for, Great Bend Overlook was preferable to the Archery Field and Snake Hill Overlooks, and I was not disappointed when I arrived.
As I had hoped, there were clouds in the canyon. They weren’t as high in elevation as I have scene in the most picturesque of scenes, but it proved to be a lovely scene nonetheless. I would stay at the Great Bend Overlook for nearly 2 hours as the light changed. It was really neat, but is a very monochomatic scene in the summer. I know it holds potential to be beautiful at peak fall foliage, but the scene before me was most suited for a black and white treatment. Well, except for the image that I captured with a hot air balloon in the distance … that one might benefit from the color treatment, but the balloon is not near enough to make for too-nice an image.
Once the light became too harsh, I returned to the park at the upper/middle falls and made breakfast which included pancakes, potatoes, bacon, and hot tea. I ate breakfast standing and walking, because I was bothered throughout the meal by some small swarming (non-biting?) bugs. Even so, breakfast was nice and I would wait a little bit for the griddle to cool off before heading back out to drive to the lot at the lower falls.
The lower falls are nice enough, but not quite as pretty for photographs as the upper and middle falls. Even so, they were worth the short walk to first be viewed from above …
… then from below.
The view of the lower falls from down stream is also where the river is the most narrow, so it offered a nice opportunity to capture some of the details in the walls of the canyon.
After walking around the canyon for a little while, I had a snack and decided that I would explore the eastern side of the park where there were a series of trails that were outlined on my map. The plan was to drive over to a trailhead, walk around for approximately 90 mins, then return to camp to clean up, eat dinner, and tear down most of camp in advance of going to the park in the evening.
Little did I know that the road that I needed to travel to get to the trailhead was nearly 1.5 miles of single lane 5 mph driving on a gravel road. Still, when I arrived I determined that I could still manage to a 90 minute walk and have time to do all that I needed to do before dusk and there was a trail that seemed short enough in length that would provide me with access to the river.
What I should have considered was that I starting from the top of the canyon and (while the distance on the map didn’t look like much, I would be descending 700 feet to arrive at the water’s edge. And while getting there wasn’t too much work, the pay-off was a bit disappointing as well as I was rewarded a view of the river from a trail that stopped at a cliff’s edge where mosquitos had been patiently waiting all day for my arrival. I didn’t even bother getting out the Olympus; I took a panorama with the Pixel phone camera and quickly retreated to the woods.
As I made my return to near the top of the canyon, I eventually came to a fork in the path and was faced with the choice of taking the same direct path back to the car, or exploring a bit more with a detour. I chose the latter, which (as the crow flies) didn’t seem like it would add too much to my distance walked, but was more serpentining than I had expected. 4.7 miles and 105 minutes after walking from my car, I would find my way back, having walked 2 miles more and 45 minutes longer than I had initially expected when I had left.
And while the walk was nice enough, it was not at all remarkable in any way. It was a nice enough walk in the woods where I had the place all to myself and crossed paths with only one couple the entire time that I was there, but the woods there looked like the chaotic-looking woods that can found anywhere in Upstate NY.
After I returned to camp, I cleaned-up (remembering the towel this time), made some dinner (same as the night before), had a cold beer (Purple Monkey Dishwasher, which tasted delicious), packed up the canopy and shower/outhouse, and was back at the park an hour before sunset with hopes of capturing an image with a little more interest in the sky at either Inspiration Point or the upper falls.
While the sky was mostly clear, I was eventually rewarded for my patience with some high clouds over Inspiration Point where I setup the tripod and captured a sequence of 5 exposure bracketed images when the clouds moved fully into the scene. Unfortunately, by the time the clouds were in a desirable spot in the frame, the light was very flat on the river and falls, so it was a win-lose scenario that resulted in an image that would ultimately prove to be inferior to the image that I had captured the night before.
After taking the picture from Inspiration Point, I returned to the middle falls out of a feeling of near-obligation. The falls are nice enough, but there is no vantage point that is really pretty without incorporating man-made barriers/construction and/or people. I grabbed a few cliched images of couples at the middle falls and called a night.
I returned to camp by 8:30, talked with the kids, surfed the net/news, talked to Christine, then went to bed in the bag that I had rearranged earlier in the day and getting into bed was much easier as a result and – while I didn’t fall asleep right away – I was asleep in less than hour. But only for an hour before I realized that I had forgotten to pack something.
I woke up, it was approx 50-55 degrees, and my head was cold. It was that moment when I realize that I hadn’t packed a beanie cap. And it wasn’t as if I had forgotten to pack it; I had forgotten to consider that I might need to pack it at all. I spent the next 45 minutes trying to tuck my head into my sleeping bag, but it wasn’t working … I needed to get out of the tent and get my hoodie.
Of course, wouldn’t you know it that as I climbed out of the the tent, I rubbed my back against the dew covered opening while wearing the one-and-only long sleeve shirt that I had brought with me? I put the hoodie on over my damp shirt and returned to bed with a warmer scapl, but a now-wet-and-sticky back. It woud take me another 15-30 minutes to fall asleep.
Another hour later, I would wake up again, this time cold. The temps had droped below 50 degrees, and I had learned that 50 degrees was the apparent limit of my comfort in my lightsleeping bag. I probably could have lasted a little longer with heavier socks and thermal/wool pants, but I had packed neither and was too stubborn to consider switching bags at this point in time, despite having the heavier bag in the car. There was condensation all over the walls of the tent and it would proven to be a logistical nightmare. No … I would try to acclimate and push through it.
That lasted for 30 minutes before I conceded and got up at 1600 (after the near-full moon had dropped below the horizon to photograph the night sky and the milky way. The light pollution was such that I had a difficult time finding it and needed to download an app on my phone to help me locate it, but once I did, I was able to compose it nicely in the western sky with the fish-eye lens that I had acquired explicitly for this purpose.
Getting infinity focus was easy and I was able capture a series of images in short order with intentions of blending the images for noise reduction in Sequator. In hindsight, I probably could have used an ISO of 1600 instead of 3200 and left the shutter open for closer to 30 seconds, but I didn’t expect a great image and was really using the camera as excuse to get out of a cold sleeping bag.
After packing up, I would return to the park and Great Bend only to discover that there were no clouds/fog in the canyon Sunday morning. I would instead walk/drive the park to capture a few compositions that I had seen earlier in the weekend, but never had the right light.
I would later return to the upper falls one last time with a thermos of tea and my 17mm lens manually pre-focused and set for a train to pass over the bridge in the morning light, but it wasn’t meant to be. There was a little more cloud in the sky than had been earlier the previous to days, but not enough to make the image stand-out on its own without a train to add some interest.
At 0830, I started to make my way to the car, only to hear the flame from a hot air balloon over the middle falls. Although it was barely visible, the low fog/cloud cover over the falls thinned enough for one series of captures that would ultimately become my last of what had been a very successful weekend.
