Cypress Awaiting the Touch of Dawn

Early light strikes the rust orange autumn needles of distant bald cypress, while the wide-trunked closer trees huddle in shadow and shallow waters for a few minutes more.

 

I have been alternatingly busy and working and healing and mostly away from photography for quite a while now, and in reflection as in real time, I have very much missed the inspiration and nourishment photography provides. So before Thanksgiving we made a spur-of-the-moment run to George L. Smith State Park in Georgia, a location new to me, and one that greatly exceeded my expectations.

 

The park rangers told us the area had been suffering drought for much of the year and, as a result, the lake levels were way down, so low in fact that we weren't allowed to put in a kayak. While paddling through the quiet of this densely beautiful cypress forest would have been ideal, it was beautiful too seeing the crowds of thick fluted barrel-like trunks surging above the depleted waterline.

 

The exposed, now dried, lakebed was spongy and unstable, consisting of years upon years of accumulated detritus and mud, and made for a few uncertain swampy steps as we hiked carefully along in places that typically only a kayak could have gone in search of beautiful compositions close among the trees

 

Thanks for viewing!

 

Done