Little Bluff Cabin Cam October 20 - cool and breezy - a bit of FALL COLOR is beginning to happen, but probably another couple of weeks before we see widespread color - ALWAYS look for the small details in the forest (and in LIFE) and you might be in for a smile... HAPPY MONDAY TO YOU!

Our Canvas Gallery IS OPEN Saturday and Sunday November 8-9, 9-5; and also by appointment other days. CLICK HERE for more info

You can now order a signed copy of our new ARKANSAS WATERFALLS guidbook #3 direct from me! CLICK HERE for details. (you can also pickup at our gallery and save shiping cost)

Prinit of the week Speciial (above) - click for more info

10/03/25 While in Boxley early this morning looking for elk (didn't find any), I stopped by the old steam-powered sawmill - it seems to have begun imploding so I figure it won't be long before it all comes tumbling down (although the smoke stack will likely remain - it is secured pretty well with a three-point wire system). NOTE: this is PRIVATE PROPERTY and there's no trespassing. I've been asked by the current owners to take a few photos when I can, so I stop by once in a while.

10/16/25 A quick recap of summer, 2025

June found me deep into the past year’s photos as I spent about a week picking 14 new photos for the new 2026 wall calendar. Most were pretty easy picks and seemed to stand out, with a couple being literally shot for the calendar - I enjoy that part of the process when it just rolls out of the camera and onto a wall calendar. (NOT very often).

Took me another week to process the files and put the calendar together and get it ready to send off to our printer in Montana. My lovely bride had also spent a good bit of time with the bones of the calendar, getting all the holidays and dates and full moons in order. OK, another half day to upload the file via the intergalactic web machine, and we were good to go. First big project of the summer done. CHECK!

And then the fun began. It had been more than a dozen years ago that the Second Edition of the Arkansas Waterfalls guidebook was published (small updates and reprints along the way since). Mentally I got to work on the Third Edition of this popular guidebook within weeks of that time, knowing it would most likely be a whopper of an update, if I ever lived long enough to get it done. As the years went by and I documented more and more waterfalls - so did a lot of other people, mostly on social media. Turns out it is really easy to find, name, and talk about waterfalls on the internet, and oh so popular. Putting them into a guidebook and paying for it all is always a drag. And for several years I kind of neglected the process, just letting the other guys have all the fun. But as I aged and the questions became pretty constant about when #3 would be available, I knew I wouldn’t be able to retire or stand down until it was done.

I had gone through several spurts of serious and significant discovery and documentation of some pretty major waterfall areas - touch of that was fueled with help from Fireman Jeff, who has always been fearless and willing to get out and WORK to get into these new places. But I think it was Pam who finally put her foot down back in January of this year that I HAD to get the ghost darn update DONE, NOW! And I agreed 100%, but that just led to months and months of intense trips into the woods in search of even more waterfalls, but also a great deal of time spent going back to previous finds and ones other folks documented as well - although I tended to shy away from most of the social media crowd batches - there were so MANY waterfalls, with many, many, many being little more than a squirt of water over a rock. (oops was that my outside voice?). But all that activity really got folks out in the woods looking and that is always a great thing.

Anyway, I finally had to put a stop to my madness of exploring more, and declared at the end of May with my final couple of wild trips into the summer jungle with flooded landscapes, and oh so many great new waterfalls and photos of them!, that I was DONE with the field work and it was time to get down to business. You see, 99% of the FUN is finding waterfalls, but that’s only about 1% of the WORK involved with creating a guidebook. The fun was over (wait a minute, didn’t I just say the FUN was about to begin? I was being facetious.

So the grand plan was to lock myself inside our storage shed at the Colorado campsite and toil away at the business of writing a guidebook - and not let myself out until the job was done. In the meantime Pam would have to produce 50 brand new maps from scratch, and she was also locked inside the shed with me - each of us with giant computer monitors. I had brought with me a mountain of reference materials that I had collected over the past decade, which was ALMOST enough for us to get everything done. Almost. I ended up only calling on Jeff to get out in the middle of the terrible Arkansas summer to climb up a steep canyon wall in search of a new route - one I hoped he could find, although he had never been there before. Turns out there was no new route, only a rather difficult one between point A and point B that I’d found several years ago. But at least he confirmed the hard way was the only way.

We had somewhat of a deadline approaching, and Pam and I toiled seven days a week, and me many night as well, sometimes working into the week hours of the night, other times getting up in the middle of the night to begin a work day. Inside the shed it’s all the same, daylight, darkness, or dawn.

We really only had one week of less-than-total exhaustion working on this project - that’s the week our friends, Ray and Susan Scott came out to camp with us for a week. I still worked every day on the guidebook, but was also able to spend some great time with them and we did some fine scenic drives in the Colorado High country. Turns out this would be the only time all summer I’d get any break from the shed.

Oh way, Pam had to return to Arkansas for a trip to Missouri to dog sit for a few days. I took that opportunity to move the guidebook operations into our camper van and out of the shed, which allowed me to work around the clock, and spread out all the resource materials where I could much more easily see them. The pups thought I had gone mad, but I always managed to get them out for a morning and evening hikes up into the high country - if not for them I’d probably have gained 20 pounds just sitting in front of computers all summer.

Only ONE big interruption during this time. The printing company in Montana - who we have used for our beautiful wall calendars each year since before COVID - made one slight error when they printed the calendars - and I didn’t get to see what had happened until several weeks after they had been delivered to the distributer. The printed them on the WRONG PAPER!!! Mistakes happen, but it took them a full two weeks to admit this mistake, but when they did, there was no hesitation to reprint everything and so the multi-week standoff ended the way it should have begun. We have another terrific 2026 Arkansas Wall Calendar - and this one even includes and extra month (I figured out how to add January 2027 without increasing the cost.)

Back home my bride was not having a good time. She had a terrible accident while dog sitting - a giant steel-framed Murphy Bed she was sleeping in came out of the wall and came crashing down on her, literally pinning her inside for a while. She was alone and her phone was out of reach. She did manage to remove herself, but not after a great deal of effort, and blood loss.

She made it back hone OK and somehow managed to DRIVE to her friend’s house in CANADA to spend a week painting outdoors. THAN she had to drive all the way back to Colorado! She is one tough cookie! (FYI, no broken bones from the bed accident, but she still has one foot and ankle that remained bruised and swollen, though getting better all the time).

Her return to the Colorado campsite in late August was my BIG DEADLINE - I HAD to have the text waterfall guide text DONE by then, and sure enough I pretty much DID - YIPPIE! But that was just the start of the long process of final editing of the text, maps, AND photos. Turns out in this case picking processing the photos was the easy part - although there turned out to be a lot MORE of everything that I had planned one. My goal since way back when the previous edition had been released, was to add about 100 new waterfalls. Well, I missed a little bit. There’s more than 200 new waterfalls included in the guidebook! I just couldn’t help myself. And along with that came almost 200 more PAGES. Uggg, how are we going to pay for all of that? AND then we got the crazy idea to add WIRE BINDING to the book to make is much more user friendly. And so we did. But oh my gosh, it literally ended up costing us an additional $15k (US Dollars, if that is still a thing). And while the book was already going to be more expensive than ever, most of the expense was due to the extra 200 pages and the overall increase in paper and printing costs over the last decade. We ended up having to eat that $15k wire and keep the retail price for a 500-page full color glossy book at only $34.95.

There were at least a dozen major roadblocks along the way during those last weeks, but eventually we got the entire book project completed and off to the printers in Illinois. WHEW, THAT WAS ONE GIGANTIC GUIDEBOOK UPDATE!

(autographed copies are available at the gallery, and I'll also post a link shortly for mail orders)

I was ready for a break, but somehow that didn’t happen. Turns out I decided to see what would happen if I put together a coffee table picture book of just the new waterfalls in the guidebook. I had wanted to publish a new picture book of mine of new photos I’d taken during the past five years - to celebrate my 50th year of being a nature photographer, but had been putting that off due to not being able to find a printer in the USA that could do a good job of this at a reasonable price (all previous picture books of mine had been printed in speciality high-end printing houses in either Seoul or Hong Kong, but we quit using those guys a while ago and never wanted to return.)

Anyway, after a couple weeks of toiling, I managed to put together not one but TWO coffee table picture books of just those waterfalls - and oh my they were beautiful! I say TWO because I had one printed as a paperback and one as a hardback - I wanted to compare and see if one of them could work for my REAL picture book. These two copies cost me about $70 each, and while I would not use this same printer for this job, it gave me a lot of think about how I wanted to deal with USA printers. AND I now had two copies of a large-format book for when folks came in and wanted to know WHAT IS NEW in the update waterfall guidebook - I would just hand them one of the picture books with them all there, in order, with names and everything (but now maps or data, just the photos).

Turns out folks REALLY LIKED these waterfall-only picture books so I decided to go ahead and produce a real version that would be printed by our normal printer in Illinois. Somehow along the way first though - it was actually after I got back to Arkansas in September - I came up with the crazy idea to reprint the most popular picture book of mine that had sold out so fast not many people got to see it - my ARKANSAS GREATEST HITS book (from 2020). And after a week of reformatting to downsize this book’s physical size a little bit to 8.5” x 11” (vs. 9x12 of the original - but keeping the same 144 pages with all the same photos and text), I submitted this to the print house and will have fresh copies available for sale sometime around Thanksgiving - AT THE SAME PRICE as in 2020! ($34.95)

OK, I got the first picture book done and in production, then I turned my attention to making a final copy of the waterfall picture book, calling it: “ARKANSAS: JUST WATERFALLS”. Turns out I had to add pages to this one, and so it will be 180 pages, 8.5” x 11”, hardback, glossy paper, only $34.95 - YIPPIE! No text though - just the glorious photos of all the new waterfalls from the updated guidebook - more than 200 of them - including something like 60 being full page and even 18 double-page spreads. This one will be a waterfall lovers DREAM book. I did include each waterfall name, and an INDEX so you could easily find a particular one if you knew the name, or could easily see the big photo if you knew the name from the guidebook.

OK, we’re getting close to END of September here and I STILL DON’T HAVE a normal coffee table picture book for my 50th Anniversary. My goal was to be able to one more round of slide programs, which had to have a new picture book to go along with them. I’d already done a “greatest hits” book for my 45th, and wanted to do ALL NEW photos in the new book for my 50th year.

And so I got up one morning a couple of weeks ago and spent the next nine days combing through five years of my photography - most of it I’d not really spent much time looking at. There were a handful of obvious good ones, but I needed a LOT more than that to invest in an entire new picture book campaign with slide program and book cost. I dug deeper, much deeper, and was kind of surprised at some of the images I’d taken that I never paid attention to. Not really home-run winner material, but solid, and in many case deep and meaningful photographs of our natural world. The clock ticked on, with each day that passed would be costing me lost sales since 80% of our picture book sales are made during the Christmas Holidays surrounding my slide program schedule. And those potential dates were slipping away with each tick-tock.

With one final marathon push I emerged with not the standard 144 pages, but 180 pages of all-new photographs, captioned, processed, and placed in the book and ready for the print shop in Illinois - titled “ARKANSAS NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER - MY 50th ANNIVERSARY” - 8.5” x 11”, hardback, glossy paper, and still only $34.95!!! HOLY MOLY BATMAN! Four books and a wall calendar in four months of intense labor. WHEW, we got them done. And none too soon - I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to get enough slide shows lined up to make all of this happen, but we’ve invested nearly 100-grand on these projects getting them printed so I guess we WILL HAVE SLIDE SHOWS somehow this holiday season - coming to a town near you we hope! STAY TUNED FOR THIS SCHEDULE At the moment i only have one scheduled, in Hot Springs Village but not until January.

While all of this was going on, the new ARKANSAS WATERFALLS THIRD EDITION GUIDEBOOK arrived. There has been a slight delay with getting the books ready to ship from the Distributer in Chicago, but those should be ready to go later this week - and I will post that info here as soon as we know.

The three new coffee table picture books will probably all arrive sometime in mid-November (also from Illinois), and I’ll post that info here also. I’m hoping to have a limited supply of books to offer for sale as autographed copies through our web page, and also at the gallery. Hoping bookstores and other outlets around the state will pick them up soon after. OK, I’m kind of tired already and we have not even begun the book-selling season yet.

BUT WAIT, there is a much more important story going on here than books. Our poor Springer Spaniel boy, Wilson, has had a really bad summer. i won’t bore you with the details, but he has cancer. So far it’s not affected him AT ALL - in fact he’s every bit the athletic specimen he’s always been these past 11 years. But sad days are ahead for sure. He underwent major surgery to remove stuff last week and is at home recovering for the next few weeks. After that we’ll just have to wait and see,. Pam and I are currently on 24/7 watch doing 12-hour shifts each, mostly just keeping him company and making sure he does not rip out the sewing job they did to put him back together. And even though he’s required to wear one of those wonderful cones at all times, he is actually OK with that, well mostly. It took us a few days and a couple of late-night drives to Branson, Missouri to find a cone that he could tolerate and still keep him from chewing his stitches, but so far all is holding. We are holed up in the mud room at our cabin with Pam doing the day shift with him and me the night shift. He is in great shape and able to do just about anything, but trouble is most of what he might do will rip his stitches and the would not be good at all (some of them are inside). So we have to keep a close eye on him all the time, and also a short leash so he does not take even a single step out of line of too fast. He is being well fed with lots of attention that’s for sure! I’ll keep you posted on his condition.

This coming Friday and Saturday (October 17th & 18th) we are hosting part of the county-wide “Art Crawl” at the gallery. There are 25 artists scattered across the county hosting events - everything is free and open to the public (info and download a map here - ). One thing that makes this even kind of fun - you can collect “tickets” free from each artist, and then if you turn them in at the gazebo on the Newton County square by 5pm on Saturday, they will draw for prizes that each artist has contributed (mine are the new 2026 wall calendar and new Arkansas Waterfalls guidebook of course!) Otherwise I’ll have the gallery open on Friday and Saturday from 9-5, and probably closed on Sunday, not sure on that one yet.