I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ―
September 2020 is now in the books. Overall it has been a pretty good month. I have settled back in a groove after my 13 days of travel, camping, photography, along with my new endeavor of capturing video of my experiences back in August. It’s always nice to be back in comfortable settings. But! One should not expect to stay comfortable for long if they want to experience new things, and continue to get the most out of life they can. I suppose you can be comfortable doing that to an extent. But if you want to find out what your made of (so to speak) it usually takes pushing some comfort levels a bit.
There are more travels being planned as I write this. With the autumn season upon us it’s time to figure out where I would like to explore and when. Like every year, the when and where are important. Nothing set is stone at this point, but I need to make a plan within the next week for sure.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves… -Virginia Woolf
It is now a few hours later than when I wrote the above paragraph. And I now know when my traveling will take place. I will be hitting the road October 19 through November 1. That part is certain. over the next week I will finalize some locations. My initial thought is to head towards north east Iowa. Yeah Iowa! Nobody ever talks about Iowa for photography, at least that I have heard or read. I am already getting excited. I done a little research on fall photo opportunities in Iowa a week or so ago and was pleasantly surprised. From north to south along Iowa’s eastern border appears to be a beautiful area especially the last couple weeks of October. I’m sure the primary reason is that Iowa is bordered on the east by the Mississippi River. So it looks like there are some prime natural areas along with camping opportunities. Just what I look for.
That will be the initial plan as of this moment. We all know things can change so I will be prepared with a plan B. A week or so in the Iowa area and then a week exploring and continuing to camp in my home areas, that being the flint hills and tallgrass prairies of Kansas sound like a plan I can live with. For the past few years I have referred to this fall foliage prediction map for time and location travels plans. Obviously nothing is 100% accurate, but this map provides a good starting point for planning.
I have been out exploring some new areas close to home the last few weekends. For me that is within an hour or two’s drive. There are some small patches of colors in a handful of trees I noticed last weekend. It’s always a wait and see game when it comes to how autumn will play out. The past two years in eastern Kansas has been somewhat disappointing. Two years ago we were in a somewhat prolonged dry spell for most of the year. the majority of foliage turned brown and just dropped off without much color happening. Last year we had record rainfall throughout spring and summer. I thought that may make the fall colors wonderful, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. This year for the most part has been rather average. So my fingers are crossed. The very little I have seen so far things are looking good.
The prairies have thrived big time this year. Wildflowers of every kind have dominated the grasslands. At the moment it is the season of yellow. This happens every year during the late summer. Goldenrod and sunflowers are dominating the prairies and look wonderful. It seems to have been a good growing year for nearly everything.
New work from my time in the South Dakota Badlands, Bighorn National Forest, and the Tetons, has been added to the galleries. There might be a few more that show up in the coming weeks as well.
I’m looking forward to doing some camping over the next month. Autumn is by far my favorite time to camp. Even if I stick around eastern Kansas the next month I will venture to a few favorite camping areas. Hopefully for about a week, but I do have up to two full weeks to play with.
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
―
I am presently in a big learning curve on video production. The common sense part of me (yeah I do have a small section of that in me! Ha) tells me I should not even bring this subject up until there is actually something show for it. But I have devoted lots of time to this. So I guess it kind of fits in this “Insight” update. Video is created when I am out exploring and basically doing my normal thing. Looking for interesting sights and scenes to photograph. Attempting to video these outings takes extra awareness during the entire time, from beginning to end. Talk about out of my comfort zone, this does it! But I have been enjoying it tremendously.
I will begin to upload videos when I have a handful or more ready to go. I need to stay ahead on this so not to have long periods of nothing to share. There, I brought it up again and probably just jinxed myself. Ha…..
Hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy the changing of the seasons. Stay safe out there, and a big thanks for sticking around.
Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go. -Unknown
