Natural Bridge Falls
I thought I’d give you all a break from the Smith River images, only to take you over to the Boulder River. This scene shows where the water comes through the lower section of the Natural Bridge falls via a massive sinkhole or underground cave structure. The falls are actually much larger than they appear in this image, though you can get an idea of scale from the logs just to the left of the mouth - the larger of the two is about 40 - 45 feet long and 3 feet thick. Regardless…lots of water, and this is only a fraction of the size it will be in another month. I’ll be sure to post some follow-up images the next time I venture over that way.
***Update - I’ve posted another image from this outing on the Fine Art Photoblog, which presents a better idea of the cliff face itself. It’s right over here, if you want to have a look…
***Update - Be sure to check out my Natural Bridge archive for other images of this amazing location at different stages of spring / summer runoff…
While I’ve been to your neck of the woods several times during my life (and have visited the obligatory Yellowstone etc.), I’d never heard of this State Park. Now I feel like blaming someone of their poor local knowledge of interesting sites, but I’m just a bit late…
Since Montana is my Mom’s home state, I really enjoy visiting your blog and seeing the sights.
I like this shot more than the one over on the Fine Art Photoblog, but the sense of scale is really misleading. Especially since I’m quite used to seeing smaller logs so even they don’t give any true scale without the explanation. But looking closer (and knowing how water behaves) helps me get some scale from the amount of foam in the water.
Hey Ramin,
Glad to see you’re still visiting, it’s much appreciated. It’s pretty cool that you have a connection to Montana, I hope I can do it some visual justice for you.
This image was taken about 60 meters from the falls, while the rocks in the immediate foreground are only 1.5 meters away. Because I used a fairly small aperture, there’s not very much of the DOF blurring that would help convey distance. Also, there some regular ol’ pieces of driftwood in the foreground-left, sticks really, that appear comparable in size in this image to the massive logs I referenced previously. Visually, this one is kind of confusing, but that’s one of the reasons I liked it.
I’m not sure how to give you a good reference based upon the foam, neither picture really conveys how much there really was. However, the small bits of foam at the bottom edge of the image above probably vary from 3-10 centimeters… But again, I’m pretty close to them so they don’t help with the logs much. I’m going back for some more shots during higher water here in a few weeks, I’ll get a picture of someone standing next to the logs so you can really see what’s going on.
[...] about a month ago I posted an image of the Natural Bridge Falls, running at 200 CFS. Last night it finally went over 3,000 CFS and so today I headed back to get [...]