Pickens

If you're driving southeast on Hwy. 65, you dive deep into the Arkansas Delta. You pass miles of farms and fields, which are empty and fallow this time of the year. The road passes over several rivers and creeks, which usually have cypress trees growing up in the still waters. The flat lands are occasionally punctuated by silos, or a rusting old and disused cotton gins.





Most of the people speeding down Hwy. 65 probably completely miss the small community of Pickens. This was, at one time, one of the largest cotton plantations in the state. It opened in the 1880s, and eventually contained over 20,000 acres of farmland. Here you can find an old plantation house (which was built in the 1940s, replacing one that had been built in the 1880s). And also the old cotton gin, which sits along a busy set of train tracks.





I drove through the fields around Pickens, eventually making it to the edge of Dumas. I stopped at this old building, which sat by and was nicely reflected in this huge puddle.



And next to it was a spot where a house must have once stood - it's long gone except for this fireplace and chimney.



And from there I headed back towards Pickens. Besides the old house and the cotton gin, there is also an old building that once housed a mercantile store and the commissary. It was quiet when I drove by, but the building is now home to a restaurant serving southern cooking that is so good that it's said that diners from as far as Pine Bluff and Little Rock make the drive to eat here.

Just down the road, I stopped to get a shot of these new silos sitting behind an old and weathered farm building.



The 20,000 acres of the Pickens Plantation were harvested by tenant farmers and sharecroppers. They tilled the lands with mules, and families lived on the land in sharecropper cabins. It's hard to know how many people once lived here, but in the late 1940s there were over 400 houses on the plantation grounds.

But in the 1950s, mechanized farming was introduced to the Delta. Now a tractor could do the work of the sharecroppers, and all those homes were soon left empty as people went off to find jobs elsewhere. Of those 400 homes that once stood here, almost all of them are gone. Only one remains.



Along a lonely and quiet dirt road sits one last sharecroppers house. The wood is worn and cracked, and the metal roof is peeling off and full of holes. 







The sun was setting, and I set up the camera on the tripod. I wanted to get some star trails over the old house, so I waited by the camera as it got dark. But I wasn't alone out there. In the breeze, there was the unforgettable aroma of a skunk. I wasn't sure where it was coming from exactly, and I nervously glanced over at the old house. Could it be the new home of a skunk - one who was not happy about some rude paparazzi getting pictures of its den? At one point I heard something rustling around in the tall grass by the house. I nervously shined the flashlight on it, only to see an armadillo walking around. Thankful I wasn't about to get sprayed by a skunk, I turned off the light and the little armadillo went about its business.

Eventually it was dark enough to start taking pictures for the star trails. The camera sat out there for a little bit over two hours, continually taking photographs of the sharecroppers house and sky above. When I got home later I combined all the shots together, and got this result:

Cedar Creek Trail

It rained heavily the day before, enough to quickly fill up the gutters on our street with water and fallen leaves. Would it be enough to get waterfalls going? I thought so, and drove off to the closest place with good waterfalls – Petit Jean State Park.

As I left Little Rock, the sky overhead was filled with thick gray clouds. Which was perfect, since you need cloudy weather for waterfall photography. What a perfect combination, I naively thought, as I got onto the freeway.

So of course, as I made it to the park I was saddened to see breaks in the wall of clouds above. Blue sky was starting to poke through the clouds, and sunlight was starting to drift across the landscape like a spotlight. I hurried over to the Cedar Creek trail, which runs downhill along a small creek. There are a few small waterfalls along the creek, so I dutifully stopped for a few pictures while there was still good light.





The creek tumbles over this waterfall, before finally emptying into Cedar Creek. I got a few pictures before the last of the clouds drifted away, and bright sunlight washed over the park. I walked along the trail for a bit, but wasn’t able to get any other pictures due to the harsh afternoon light. Oh well, at least it was a pleasant little hike in the woods.

Lee Theater

The old Lee Theater in Little Rock was built in 1940, but it has been abandoned for decades. And now it seems that the roof of the building has finally collapsed, taking down the boarded up doors and revealing the pile of debris that stands in the former lobby.



The theater had been named one of the state's most endangered historic places in 2015 by Preserve Arkansas (and some of that history is sadly, quite sinister). Now the old theater is nothing more than a shell, just the fragile facade of a long-forgotten place.

Iced In

It's been warm and sunny the last few days, which means that all of the snow and ice from our recent winter storm has finally melted. We ended up getting mostly sleet here, which turned into a slippery coat of ice about six inches deep. It wasn't good for making snowmen, but it essentially kept us homebound for about a week. We live on a hill, and along a street that seems like it's always one of the last streets in the city to be cleared. Several cars got stuck trying to navigate the road - including a poor Door Dash driver who got was just trying to deliver a meal to someone down the road.

This is what the streets in our neighborhood looked like for a few days:



I did utilize all the time stuck indoors to go back and look through some older pictures, converting a bunch to Black and White just to see how they'd look. So here's a selection of some older photos, for your viewing enjoyment:



Way back in 2021, we took a little road trip to St. Louis. This was the view from our hotel room:



And one time a few years ago, I ended up in the Ozarks on a cold and rainy day. It had stormed, and the creeks and rivers were nearly flooded. This is Big Piney Creek at Longpool:





And after doing a short hike, I ended up at Lower Longpool Falls.





After that I headed up deeper into the Ozarks, driving along roads that dipped through some heavy fog.



And then I headed down Falling Water Road, which follows along Falling Water Creek. As you'd guess from the names, there are a lot of cool waterfalls along Falling Water Creek. The first one you see is the aptly named Falling Water Falls. The creek was nearly at flood-stage when I took these, and the falls were roaring.



One good thing about having these in Black and White is that it hides the color of the water. Since it was flooded, the water was muddy and brown (looking more like the chocolate river in Willy Wonka than the clear and turquoise waters they usually are).



And further down the creek is Six Finger Falls:







And then last year I made another little trip up to the Ozarks, and the waterfalls were flowing well again:





And it was another foggy and rainy day as I drove around the Buffalo National River:









And also last year, we made some trips to the Big City. Here's a few shots from Chicago (specifically from the Hancock Tower):





And then a few from New York:















And one last picture, which I really like because of how it looks like the public art/sculpture that looks like Pac-Man is peeking out from behind the carousel.

Judsonia

There are two old bridges that cross the Little Red River in Judsonia. One is an old train bridge, which was built in 1912 by the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railroad.



The other is an old vehicle bridge, built in 1924.



And both are still in use. As I was out there for nearly two hours while the camera was taking enough pictures for these star trails, the quiet night was punctuated by the doleful wail of a train whistle, followed by the thunderous avalanche of sound as a train crossed over the creaky metal bridge. That was joined by the bang and clatter of the occasional car driving over the weathered wooden beams of the bridge, the sound echoing across the river.