I woke up Saturday morning and decided that I would go on a hike and take a few pictures. There is a nice, old bridge, way down in the back edge of Miller Springs Nature Center, along the Leon River, in Belton. I’ve been down there several times and have a few snapshots of the bridge, taken with my phone. This time, I wanted to take my DSLR along and get some better shots of this beautiful old bridge.
Here are a couple of photos of the old bridge, taken a couple of years ago.
I packed up all of my gear and went to kiss my wife and daughter, before I left. They decided that a hike sounded like fun, so they decided to go along with me. We loaded up in the truck and drove over to the trailhead, by the Belton Lake Dam. It was close to 10:00 AM when we hit the trail.
Miller Springs Park and Nature Center are located on opposite sides of the Leon River, below the Belton Lake Dam. This dam was constructed in the late 1940’s by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as a flood control measure. It is an earthen dam, which basically filled in the space between two hills, creating a reservoir. Below the dam, where the park and the hiking trails are located, the terrain is made up of rough canyons (at least by Central Texas standards) and rocky washed, covered by Cedar trees as well as Oaks, Pecan trees and a host of other species of trees. The trails are not tough, by Colorado standards, but they are rough and rocky in certain areas. It is a very nice hike, and I highly recommend it…in March-May or October-November!
I got this image of what seemed to be an omen, before we headed down into the canyon
By the time we got down to the entrance into the canyon, it was already getting pretty warm, but I was finding lots of interesting things to photograph, so I didn’t notice it all that much.
We proceeded down the log steps, and into the thickly wooded canyon. I shot a few more photos of my daughter on the steps, and then we proceeded down the trail. The breeze was gone, the air got thick and the sweating started!
Along the trail, there is a small body of water, called the Green Pond, due to the algae that grows in it. I shot a couple of photos of the pond, and some of the Cattails that were growing along the edge of it.
As we started moving along, toward the river, we heard the sound of running water, so we proceeded through the underbrush and came upon a small waterfall. The girls splashed water on themselves to cool off, and I set up my tripod and took a couple of pictures of the water, as it spilled down the face of the small bluff.
We moved on toward the river, along the trail that I have been down several times, but there was a new pond in the way. Apparently, some of the rains the we received over the last couple of years since I’ve been there have changed things a bit. I pulled up an aerial map on my phone and found a different route to the bridge. Unfortunately, the only route that I could find, that didn’t require swimming, would add several miles to our hike. At this point, we had been down in the canyon and Cedars for a couple of hours, so the girls informed me that we were done with our hike!
We turned around and started up the trail that led back up and out of the canyon. I shot a few more pictures as we made our way up the slope and back to the trailhead.
This is a mural, painted on the concrete wall that lines the emergency spillway for the Belton Lake Dam.
We got back to the truck around 12:30, and the thermometer read 100 degrees. We were all tired, and soaking wet from sweating. There is nothing like being in a Cedarbrake in August!
After we got back home, I loaded my photos onto my computer to sort through them. I was not very happy with the results. Almost all of the pictures were unusable, due to a lack of sharpness or high ISO noise. There was a pretty good breeze up on top, so even when I was using the tripod, the leaves in the background ended up being a bit fuzzy. I shot a lot of the images with the aperture stopped down quite a bit, to get as much depth of field as I could. Even in bright sunlight, I had to up the ISO setting to 1600 in order to get the shutter speed up fast enough to prevent the leaves from blurring. This resulted in an unacceptable amount of noise in the pictures. I was able to salvage a few images, suitable for use in this post, at lower resolutions, but I will have to make a return trip to reshoot most of them.
It was a fun trip, and we enjoyed spending time together, in spite of the ridiculous heat!