The Mountain State, Part I

I spent the first full week of October shooting in West Virginia–the greater Canaan Valley area, to be exact. It’s a locale extremely rich in photographic opportunities, as I hope to demonstrate in this entry. But there’s a back story to the trip.

Red Creek, Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

Last fall, as part of my trip to points east, I was in the Canaan Valley for less than 48 hours.  The conditions for photography were–I’ll be generous–less than optimal.  It was a poor year for fall color, due to drought-like conditions that impacted much of the United States east of the Mississippi River during the summer of 2010.  (There was almost no color to speak of in central Indiana due to prolonged drought and conditions in northern Illinois were decidedly sub par.)  On top of that, I was late for what color did exist.  When I arrived in the valley, on the afternoon of Friday, October 15, 2010, I was greeted with rain squalls and high wind.  The rain disappeared overnight, but blue skies and high winds remained for the duration of my time in West Virginia.  On the morning of Saturday, October 16, at Bear Rocks in the Dolly Sods Wilderness, I dealt with wind gusts in excess of 40 MPH, with air temperatures right around freezing.  Despite the rain that fell on the day I arrived, because of the depth of the drought creeks and waterfalls were flowing poorly.  It was close to a worst case scenario, photographically speaking.  I emerged with, perhaps, a handful of decent shots from my time in the area.

Red Maples at Pendleton Point, Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia

And yet…the potential of the area was glaringly obvious to me, despite all of the negatives I was dealing with at the time.  There were breathtaking mountain overlooks, misty valleys, unique heaths, rushing streams and rivers, waterfalls, rustic farms and an almost endless assortment of deciduous and coniferous trees.  Given the proper conditions, if I couldn’t make compelling autumn images here, I reasoned,  I probably ought to find something else to do with my time.

Elakala Falls, Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia

As a result, I started plotting a return visit during the following autumn.  The color season had to be better in 2011, I concluded.  And the next time around, I’d time my arrival for the first week of October, when peak color in the area is historically likely, rather than the middle of the month.  I’d plan to stay for far more than 48 hours to hopefully avoid the possibility of running into bad luck with the weather over a short period of time.

Blackbird Knob Trail, Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

I did have the experience of having spent a weekend in the area the year before–so I was familiar with the Bear Rocks area of Dolly Sods, Elakala Falls and Pendleton Point in Blackwater Falls State Park and a few spots in the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, but I knew I’d barely scratched the surface.  Fortunately, Jim Moore, who knows the Potomac Highlands as well as anyone, was willing and able to give me a plethora of information and recommendations, all of which was of incomparable assistance to me.  I had a rough itinerary and a series of contingencies, depending on specific weather and foliage conditions.

Abandoned Barn, Randolph County, West Virginia

2011 shaped up as a much better year for fall color in the region, as I anticipated.  But as I drove into northeast West Virginia from the Midwest on Sunday, October 2, I was greeted with snow at the higher elevations.  Sunday was the third day in what turned out to be a five-day stretch of non-stop precipitation (some of it snow, some of it rain).  The question I asked myself, of course, was how would this impact shooting conditions while I was in the region?

Blackwater Falls, Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia

The short answer is, while it almost undoubtedly shortened the period of peak color and made sunrises and sunsets a composite rumor for the first three days I was on the ground in West Virginia, it also swelled creeks and rivers to provide almost the polar opposite of the conditions I faced in the region the previous year.  Once the weather cleared–it finally stopped precipitating late in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 4 and the weather cleared overnight; I finally viewed a sunrise/sunset on Wednesday, October 5–I scarcely saw a cloud for the duration of my time in West Virginia.

Canaan Mountain Color, Monongahela National Forest, West Viriginia

But while the conditions were less than ideal, they weren’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination.  Some degree of adjustment and flexibility was necessary to create compelling imagery but by no means were good shots impossible to find.  So there was a bit of the “lemonade from lemons” rationale to apply, but only a degree.  The images accompanying this entry were all made on the first two full days–Monday, Oct. 3 and Tuesday, Oct. 4–that I was in the region.  The sun was never in evidence at any point during this time, but sunlight would have degraded–if not completely ruined–most of the images presented here.

Gandy Creek, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

The moral of the story, assuming there is one, is not to allow a negative present blind you to the potential of a given location.  Had I drawn such a conclusion in mid-October of 2010, I wouldn’t have made the effort to return this year.  And that would have been a mistake.

In the next installment, I’ll post some images from the middle of my week in the Canaan area along with an accompanying narrative.