Spirit's Creek this morning

This is a neat little waterfall a short distance downstream of Forest Road 1003. There is a road on river right and it only takes about five minutes to get to this spot. After I took this shot, I headed to the trailhead on FR 1509 and hiked down to Spirits Creek. A good hike but the Sun caught up with me. I will post one additional shot below taken at the stream.

Hey Tim, I just saw your note about the Forest Service closing everything north of I-40. Kind of funny, there was no evidence in the area I traveled and no problems at all. The hike from the trailhead at FR 1509 to Spirit's Creek was completely clear and in fact the trail was in really good shape. It looked like there had been some recent maintenance in the fall but nothing this past week.
Could the Forest Service be over reacting?

Canon 5d Mark II
F8 .3 sec
ISO 100
24-70L Canon lense
Polarizer

Here is a shot from Spirit's Creek where the Ozark Highland's Trail crosses the creek.

Hey Tom - YES, the forest ALWAYS over-reacts - in the "name of public safety." Fact is that they will often use something like this to put together a plan for a major timber sale - that is what they live for, timber sales and big burns. They have all but abandoned the OHT in the past few years and most of them don't even know it is there or where it is if they do. I expect we will have a pretty large fight with them over this - people have planned long hikes on the OHT for a long time, and especially with the National Geographic feature article on the OHT there will be a lot of new traffic on the trail from all over the country and from lots of other countries in the coming months - let's hope that someone will step up within their agency and see the light and take the clamps off.

Could you PLEASE contact the forest service office in Ozark and let them know what you found and what you think about it - they NEED to hear from the public! All I have seen is how dramatic it was for them to cut their way up to White Rock Mountain to rescue Paula White! There is damage no doubt, but enough to close the entire forest to recreation? Hardly...

I will call them tomorrow. I know Gary Williams, the Forest Supervisor, pretty well and he tends to be pretty reasonable when presented with the facts.

Hwy 123 looked almost like the ice skipped it, except near Pelsor where is was bad. I stayed near Haw creek but everything I saw was clear. There was absolutely no need to close it.

Glad to see you're finally getting a chance to break in that new body, Tom. Two really nice shots, especially the second one with that warm light. And thanks for the road reports.

Yeah, the warm light in the second image really draws me in Tom. Looks like that new body captured a lot of fine detail. Thanks for sharing.