The winter landscape can be messy, especially in forested areas hit hard by the ice storms of recent years, but it can also be more interesting with the foliage no longer hiding the contents of the forest from view.

Probably the most annoying thing about winter is scraping frost off my windshield in the morning. I absolutely hate that!

The weather was a bit chilly the first few days but that didn’t stop us from getting outside…

Steph and Emma

Eily wore her bear coat when we went for a walk.

Emma rode around on her tricycle. She's getting pretty good at it!

One morning Emma and I went for a hike at a nearby conservation area. Emma hiked 2 miles all on her own! I was so proud! Some stray dogs tagged along.

A small stream near a spring.

Hayes Spring, from which this conservation area gets its name.

One of the dogs jumped into the spring and couldn't get out so I had to extract it. Emma was excited to tell Steph how we saved the doggy.

I asked Emma where she wanted to eat lunch and she said "under the big (pine) tree!". To which I responded, "thats my girl!" Ha!

I have always wanted to check out the historic "Y Bridge" in Galena so we took a quick detour and walked across it.

Nice view of the James River, which is quite clean and clear here.

Eily Beth enjoyed her time at the lakehouse.

Eily snuggling up to daddy before bedtime.

We went to Silver Dollar City on friday. Emma had a good time doing some new rides.

Emma rode the teacups and enjoyed it immensely. She's becoming such a big girl!

I rode the 'big swings' with her.

Nonna and Papa came for a visit at the end of our trip.

A nice sunset over the lake at the end of our vacation! Good times!

Then, we headed to the visitor center and walked a trail into the prairie. Prairie State Park is a glimpse of what a large portion of Missouri used to look like. Unlike most other Missouri state parks, it’s monotonous and sparse, but I also think it’s very relaxing and beautiful out in the wide open space. Emma seemed to enjoy it as well.

Coincidentally there is a small state forest on the same road as Prairie State Park. The land is an old strip mine that was planted with numerous tree species and eventually donated to MDC. I remember riding bikes on the paths with my parents a long, long time ago. Emma enjoyed running up the trails and particularly enjoyed the turtle we found!

So we had a great day enjoying the weather, taking photos, and being out in nature!

I didn’t get any great photos of some of the cool features we saw, mainly due to hazy midday lighting conditions and the fact that I was too tired to go climbing around looking for the best angles. Nevertheless, we saw a lot of great scenery without having to travel very far!

Packed up and ready to head out on the trail. We started at the Powder Mill Trail Head.

We hiked the “Current River Section” of the trail, although aside from this crossing, we really never even saw the Current River. On a side note, I am very fascinated by the beautiful teal colored streams and rivers of the Ozarks. I’ve seen lots of rivers all over the world, some very clear ones, but nothing that compares with the deep teal colored streams so common throughout the Ozarks. I am not sure what causes this, but I like it a lot!

I took entirely too much photography gear and food. Better safe and exhausted than hungry and needing a tripod I guess.

This area is called Klepzig Mill and was one of my favorite spots along the trail.

We enjoyed lunch at this nice overlook of Klepzig Mill.

Here is a clear pool of water below another series of rapids and waterfalls called Buzzard Mountain Shut-Ins.

Buzzard Mountain Shut-Ins

I like this area because it contains a lot of pine forest. Most of the trail was Oak, Hickory, and Pine mix, however this mile or so was mostly just Pine, so it smelled really nice!

We opted not to carry 2 days worth of water and instead got water from this clear creek and purified it. It tasted quite nice, maybe better than the tap water we brought!

Rocky Falls, another cool area along the Ozark Trail. This was actually a spur off the main trail, but well worth the side trip.

The trail started getting steeper as we made our way up Stegall Mountain. A massive t-storm hit us as we were approaching the summit so we were unable to safely explore the area and enjoy the view. Had the weather been more cooperative we would have enjoyed this view…

Thanks to Ozark Bill for allowing me to use his photo from a more successful trip up Stegall.

We hiked back down a ways where lightning would be less of a risk and setup “camp”, which consisted of a couple rainproof hammocks. Actually worked out very nicely and we stayed nice and dry even though it rained non-stop for about 15 hours!

More shut-ins as we made our way back the next morning.

Crossing was a bit more of a challenge on the return trip due to the rains the night before. I hopped across but Ian was a bit nervous at first.

Crossing here Ian almost completely lost it. Somehow we both managed to get to the other side ‘mostly’ dry. From that point on I didn’t really take any photos because I was too tired…

So in summary, while being less exotic than previous trips, it was still a great time and we saw some great scenery here at home!

One the way home we had lunch in Chillicothe, MO which in addition to being my grandmother’s home town, is apparently also the home of sliced bread. Upon further investigation I found that the bread slicer was actually invented in Davenport, IA, however it was first used on a commercial scale by a bakery in Chillicothe. Battle Creek, MI also lays claim on sliced bread, but most bread historians seem to go with Chillicothe.

Also interesting is that sliced bread was illegal for short time in 1943 because it was believed to require additional packaging to keep fresh. The ban was lifted after much upheaval and turmoil among bread producers and consumers nationwide.

At any rate, now you know what town to thank every time you make toast without having to cut up your bread first.

When I transitioned into digital, one downside was my loss of this effect. I tried numerous ways, including photoshop layers, digital effects, and even using a red filter and converting the image to black and white. No matter what I tried, the results looked plain terrible. It seemed that JPG files deteriorate when exposure and contrast (especially in the blue channel) is pushed to the extreme.

Saturday I decided to try some new things, in hopes I would be able to better reproduce the “ansel adamsy” look. I had come to the conclusion that using an actual red filter on a digital camera was not the way to go. So I shot normal color photos, and used a polarizer filter to keep the nice blue sky from getting washed out. If you have a graduated neutral density filter (who doesn’t!?) that might work as well. Then I set my camera to “RAW” mode, which saves images straight to disk with no processing or JPG compression. Shooting RAW files vs. JPG allows significantly greater flexibility in adjusting color temperature (white balance), exposure, and all the other settings I would need to digitally reproduce the effect film use to achieve so effortlessly…but at the expense of files that can only be opened by special programs and can exceed 35mb each! Yikes!

So here is a color example from Saturday’s shoot:
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And here is the same photos with the black/white + red filter effect:

Here are a couple others of two Bur Oaks:

I think it’s a fairly cool look, although I feel as though I am somewhat violating my unspoken rule of minimalist “photoshopping” to my photography. Then again, this same effect can be achieved via traditional photography techniques. After all, one of my favorite photographers, Ansel Adams did it back in the ’30s and ’40s.

I remember liking this stretch of highway even when I was a kid, long before I knew I would reside here. As luck would have it, I now travel this route constantly to get into town (Carthage) and also because Steph’s parents live about 3 miles up this way.

I like living on historic route 66. Most of the road itself isn’t anything special, but it represents an idea of nostalgia. Once a major thoroughfare, now it’s just an out of the way back road. But it’s famous and I think it’s cool having an address that is “Old Route 66″.

Although I am more than ready for warmer temps and seeing the deciduous trees come back to life, I always enjoy a good snow storm. Taking this was actually a bit tricky, thanks to the horizontally blowing snow. I felt like I was trekking up to the north pole or something just walking around in the front yard.

What’s really on my mind though is the bike ride this saturday. I recall when they postponed it to March thinking “it can be really cold in March… heck it could even SNOW!” So we’ll see how the next few days shape up for bike riding…

Grant checkin' out a small waterfall along Center Creek (insert waterfall sound)

The furthest I had ever been down Center Creek was the park in Carl Junction. So this time we started there and floated down to the bridge near Smithfield, which is the last takeout point before the river flows into Kansas and merges with Spring River. I found this section of the river to be particularly enjoyable because it seemed to have an abundance of rapids compared to other sections, and there were a lot of large rock bottom areas. I also enjoyed the numerous small wet weather waterfalls along the bank… though there are several of these just upstream from my house as well.

It is also worth nothing that Grant and I have become fairly proficient at the logistics of a self-guided float trip, considering we both drive compact cars. Who would have thought a kayak can almost entirely fit in the trunk of a jetta with another one tied to the top without even taking off my bike rack!? Sweet lovin!