Flume Gorge

Today was split between hiking in New Hampshire and a lot of back-roads driving in Maine. We hit Flume Gorge in Franconia State Park near Lincoln New Hampshire around noon. It was cloudy when we started, but ended sunny. The great part was that the clouds were at the beginning, when I was most interested in getting pictures of the water — meant I could get reasonably slow shutter speeds without resorting to the neutral-density filter (which is a pain because it's too dark for the camera to either focus or meter).


This covered bridge was at the beginning of the trail; it was the first of two.


Shortly after the bridge we left the water, wandered through a cabin, and then came back to the water at this point. They call this "Table Rock," which seems a bit silly to me, as the feature isn't that unique, really.


From there, we followed the stream to the entrance to the gorge. There was a lot of water moving very fast.

The gorge itself was impressively narrow and deep. They'd set walkways above the water, hanging to the edge of the cliffs, so that we could be right in the gorge from beginning to end. The picture on the left shows the whole gorge, the picture on the right is a detail of the falls at the end, shot with a longer lens from essentially the same viewpoint.


This picture gives a good sense of how the walkways hung out over the water. Tracy is looking back the way we came, at the top of the cascade in the pictures above.


These falls, which were above the gorge, were created in an avalanche that occurred during a storm in the late 1800s. They call them "Avalanche Falls," appropriately enough.

These two pictures show the difference between shooting water at a high v. low shutter speed. Obviously, I prefer the low shutter speed (at right). It's actually not as smooth as I'd like. The sun was out at this point, so I couldn't get as long an exposure as I wanted (without resorting to the neutral-density filter).


After we left the gorge, the trail wound around back to where we started. Along the way, we passed another gorgeous cascade.


We came to another gorge, much wider than the first, spanned by another covered bridge.


This bridge has as its primary support the trunk of a single, massive pine tree. The tree was over 175 feet tall when it fell in the late 1800s and was used shortly after to build this bridge.

Vermont

We started today in Winooski (part of Burlington), Vermont (just across from New York) and ended in Littleton, New Hampshire (just across from Vermont). So today was basically all Vermont — which is beautiful. It was rainy this morning, so we headed out late, but it cleared up after noon.

We went to Camels Hump State Park to try to climb Camels Hump mountain, but the trail to the summit was closed until memorial day, so it could dry out.


So we walked the much shorter "view" trail, instead. This picture shows the mountain, but the summit is shrouded in cloud: even though the sun had peeked out, there were clouds hanging around the mountain the whole time we were there.


We did, however, find this toad. He was very friendly and consented to pose for pictures...

... after I moved him into the sun.


Nothing particularly Vermont-ish, but they were fun to take.


And look at all that nice, soft bokeh!

After the hike, we went through Stowe and stopped off at the Ben & Jerry's factory on the way for their tour.


We also found this covered bridge (Tracy has a thing for covered bridges). It is the last still-operational covered railroad bridge in the country. The sign says so.


However, the sign is dated 1968. It's not actually operational anymore.

Chittenango

On our way from Syracuse (where we stayed last night) to Vermont, we took a detour and stopped at Chittenango Falls. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I really like taking pictures of waterfalls; I'm addicted to slowing them down with my neutral density filter. It's almost as bad as my addiction to lots of really soft bokeh.


This was shot from the observation point halfway down the wall of the gorge.


Off to the side, before turning to cross the stream on the footbridge they'd set up, there was this smaller cascade. In a way, I like it even better than the main falls.


Here is the main falls, seen from the footbridge. I almost didn't take this picture: when I got to the bridge, there was a lot of fine spray blowing down from the falls. But after a couple of minutes, the wind shifted and I figured I could get the picture before my filter got too wet. Glad I stayed!