Gather 'Round the Pony Show
Oregon · USA
Sometimes I forget how stir-crazy Oregonians get during the cold winter and wet early-spring doldrums. But we're rather tough ol' birds at the same time, and as soon as the rate of rainfall drops to less than an inch an hour, you can expect the Gorge parking lots to fill up faster than Walmart's on Black Friday. So it was with a little bit of shock and dismay when, while on an entertaining hike with photog friends Steven Michael, Kay Martin, and Gulnara "GiGi" Peek, we returned to Ponytail Falls to find a throng of ogling spectators after having been turned back by trail crew clearing a landslide directly above the boot path to Upper Oneonta Falls. But who could blame them, really, when the falls traces such a graceful arc in the belly of a such a beautifully verdant canyon? I usually don't care to include people or manmade objects in my landscapes if I can help it at all, but I figured this time I'd just go with the flow and resist the urge to Photoshop them out in post-production. I think they lend a dual sense of scale here rather nicely--both in terms of Ponytail's beguiling size and its growing popularity with the locals.
