Northwestern Arkansas: Day 0
Recently I made a trip to Northwestern Arkansas with family for a long weekend. We’ve been making family trips down to Arkansas for the past 20 years or so. Typically Jasper, Arkansas is our center. The Ozark Cafe has the best food and the Gordon Motel has to be the cheapest around. Hiking trails and waterfalls are plentiful and canoeing on the Buffalo River is amazing!
Hiking to waterfalls was the main focus for this long weekend trip! We had planned on camping the first two nights, but it had been unseasonably cold so we planted ourselves at a hotel for the first night. Instead of waiting until morning to start our Arkansas waterfall hiking extravaganza, we set out to Triple Falls at Camp Orr the night of our arrival.
Triple Falls/Twin Falls is located at Camp Orr Boy Scout Camp just south of Harrison, Arkansas. The waterfall is accessible via the Camp Orr Boy Scout Camp road about seven miles east of Jasper, AR. After approximately 3 miles on this road winding down the “mountain” you’ll see a parking area with a sign for the waterfall. The waterfall is only 0.25mi from the parking area along a flat, easy trail. Dirt parking area can be seen in the map here. Short trail, big reward! The image below is a composite of 8 images. I wanted to capture more of the area surrounding the falls, which would look even better with some leaves on the trees to frame the falls.
We’d been to Triple Falls several times, but had never taken the trail up to the top of the falls. The trail up to the top was not long. Parts of it were steep, but not bad. Once at the top we had a look around and found one of the springs that feeds the falls. The water was flowing well and of course provided an opportunity to photograph. I rented the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 for this trip (trying new lenses) which was not wide enough to capture this spring all in one take. The image below is a composite of 4 overlapping images.
Someday I am hoping to get back down there when the leaves are out, so many photo opportunities here! More posts to come over the next week for Northwestern Arkansas Days 1, 2 and 3.
