Bear Hollow Sunrises
April 17 -30, 2005
If the day ever comes that I get a good
sunrise picture from Bear Hollow at Mount Magazine, it will be
fair to say that I earned it. I've lost count of how many early
morning drives I've made just to beat the sun there.
Sunday morning, April 17, I got up at 4:45,
but didn't get out the door until 5:20 because I had to clear
up some space on my camera's memory cards. Then my truck had a
flat tire, so I decided to take Stacey's vehicle. And I swear
every single time I want to take hers, she is about to run out
of gas. I lost another 10 minutes in Ozark putting gas in the
tank.
I decided to stop at Cove Lake and shoot
the sunset there, but the sun was already too far north and was
coming up behind the mountains, so I continued on toward Mount
Magazine. I had the frustrating experience of seeing a
intensely red ball of a sun from the road at a few spots, with
nowhere to pull over and get a shot.
Going to the top of Mount Magazine in the
spring is like going back in time 3 weeks... suddenly there
were serviceberry trees in bloom again, and the trees were just
leafing out. Yet the wildflowers seemed to be more on schedule
with the Ozarks, and one area of the Bear Hollow overlook was
thick with Spiderworts. Until now I've never been a big fan of
those flowers, but they were putting on a great show that
morning. There were a couple hundred blooms in this one small
area, and there was a big variety of colors from white to pink
to purple to violet to blue. I put the camera tripod legs
together and used it as a monopod, and followed several
honeybees and a bumblebee around the spiderworts, and took a
bunch of quick shots.
The following Saturday morning I gave Bear
Hollow another try. Man! I 'bout froze to death and got blown
off the mountain. The clouds above the horizon back behind Mt
Nebo were too thick for the sun to penetrate, so the sunrise
wasn't much, but I did get the shot at the top of this page,
right after the sun peeked through a small opening. Once it
rose above that cloud, it was bright white with a clear sky, so
I just packed it in.
A week later I woke up at 4 and made it to
Bear Hollow in plenty of time for the sunrise, but it was
pretty much a repeat of last weekend. The sun burned through
some clouds just after sunrise as a big red ball, but the
surrounding clouds were quite drab. The pictures on this page
document how quickly the sun's position changes day to day in
relation to Mt. Nebo. The photo at the top of this page from
April 23 shows the sun over the northern end. Seven days later
on April 30, shown on the pictures at right, the sun has
already moved way northward. The pictures are also a good
reference for when are the times of the year to catch the sun
rising from the hollow.
