Get Lost!

Ever get lost in the woods? Not lost lost, that's a good way to have a bad time. More lost in the sense of losing all awareness of anything outside the bit of woods you're meandering through?

For me, getting lost in the woods is the best medicine for when life or the city starts to get to me. I hope your email finds you well, it ain't finding me down in the gorge.

Red River Gorge is a great place for getting lost. The trees aren't worried about your car's extended warranty, all the tweets come from actual birds, and 5G is just a flatlander thing.

Hell, even the sun has hard time finding you there. It's rather nice, the only things you have to worry about there are bears, poisonous snakes, and falling off cliffs. Safe space, Mother Nature style.

These shots are all from getting lost going to Whittleton Arch. The trailhead is in the Whittleton campground of Natural Bridge State Park. Trailhead is all that's in Natural Bridge, the trail and arch itself are all in Red River Gorge.

In the gorge you can wander off trail and explore whatever you want, which makes it much easier to get both kinds of lost. Did enough of that that people who'd started out after me were meeting me coming back from the arch while I was still a half mile away.

Too much to see and shoot (and climb on top of) for me to make that kind of time. Plus, having someone a little bit ahead of you on the trail is a great way to cut down on the number of spiderwebs you find with your face.

Did a good enough job of getting lost that I managed to come back with more photos from the hike than I did of the arch itself. I blame it on the birds.

Recently downloaded the Merlin app on my phone, it can listen to the birds carrying on and tell you what you're hearing. I'd accidentally timed my visit for one of the seasonal bird migrations and there was more tweets without a hashtag than I'd encountered in a very long time, so I had to test the old wizard out.

He heard more warblers than I knew existed but eventually the arch (and hunger) started calling my name again. All those cliffs just make it echo around good.

Whittleton Arch proved to be well worth getting lost for. Also proved to be big enough it was difficult to get it all in the frame, even with a wide angle. Best part about it though was the all-natural air conditioning once you got beneath it.

I need to get lost here more often. Had to scramble up those rocks to even be able to get a proper shot of the arch.

The water dripping from the arch made for a rather moist microclimate beneath it. Fortunately the rockpile was nice and dry. Unfortunately the spiders had beat me to it.

Haven't seen that many spiders since my last run in with brown recluses. These weren't poisonous though so we were able to negotiate a demilitarized zone and everybody was happy.

So where do you go to get lost?

---

---

---

Some of you may have noticed me reblogging some nice astrophotography by @astronerd recently. That's my brother! I'd like to claim I recruited him to HIVE but reddit did it for me mostly. Anyways, he's aims a little higher than me, check him out and say howdy! Just don't tell him I sent you...