Color on Walker Camp Prong

I started my fall colors series last week, and I wanted to continue this week with another stream scene.  Unfortunately for me, the colors have been kind of late the last two years, and my travels have had me out of town when things were really shaping up.  However, fortunately for me the Great Smoky Mountains cover a pretty good sized altitude difference, which means in the fall, you can find color hiding around in some part of the park, even when most of it is still green.  That was definitely the case on this particular outing.  My wife and I managed to find some little pockets of really pretty color along the Walker Camp Prong, just past the Mount LeConte parking area.

I absolutely love messing around the streams in the Smokies, but my friends and I had a bit of a running joke that whenever I was near a stream, I would eventually end up in the stream, and generally not on purpose.  With camera gear, this can be especially bad!  Well, messing around in the slot canyons in southern Utah taught me something this year… just go ahead and get in, on purpose!  I’ll talk about the slot canyons later, in month or so, but the short of it is I ended up just going barefoot through some of the canyons and had a blast.  I applied this lesson in the creeks around our area and found that going barefoot kept me upright, simply because it’s easier to know which rocks are slick, and which ones aren’t.  Now… it’s cold, but worth it.  For me, I can rock hop, but sometimes the shot is actually in the water, I’ve found, and this way sure is cheaper than getting fancy boots, etc!  Oh, and you eventually get used to the water!  🙂

–Dan Thompson