Misty, smokey too--a bit. When the sun rose, it wasn't the most radiant of dawns, but the skies seemed clear and out here where we live no seasonal weather rivals early fall for gifts of grace. All I wanted to do was gather a few pictures of the Missouri River right from its banks.
Try this, a bit farther back. Not half-bad really, but pulling a memorable sunrise from that mist requires more ability than the man snapping the shutter packs with him, early morning.
I've been to the Mulberry Bend overlook tons of times, but I keep going back because the view of the river is so spectacularly wide and even varied that it always takes my breath away. The trees on the way up the path are still outfitted in their summer attire, so the view straight north and northeast--another whole gallery--is simply inaccessible. Still, the views from Mulberry Point are plain gorgeous. I don't know that I've ever been able to get it--or even a chunk of it--in a lens. It's just too big, too wide, too spacious.
The Corps of Engineers are keeping the water levels low right now, so the islands in the middle are a reminder of what Lewis and Clark had to navigate--and Mulberry Point is a great place to capture their naked emergences.
Bow Creek Recreational Area is at the end of almost eternal gravel roads, each of them smaller and smaller and rougher, more pockmarked, so that just getting there is intimidating. I couldn't help thinking I'd made a wrong turn, but no, I didn't. Bow Creek offers some bountiful looks at the river I'd come to see.
So you're saying that this can't be the Missouri. It's way, way too small. Well, it is, but what you're looking at is three shorebirds (not really) who've gathered at the edge of an island. Yes, there are islands in the swath of river that runs south and east from the dam at Pickstown, and this is one of them.
But I didn't come for an island. Here's what I'd hoped to get--some real pics of the big river itself.
And then this. This shot may not leave you breathless, but it's the kind of picture I came to get, an image that somehow creates a portrait most like the river the Corps of Discovery came to know so intimately.
Mulberry Point takes your breath away, but this is the photograph that accompanies any content that brings to life--or tries to bring to life--at least something of the experience of the Corps, right here, in 1804, making their tedious way up river. Somewhere near here, they discovered George Shannon sitting on a sandbar waiting for some lonesome trapper coming down river with a bundle of furs, looking to get paid for all his hard work, someone who'd give him a ride to St. Louis. He'd been lost for sixteen days right about here.
He thought the whole enterprise had simply gone on without him. He just figured they kept on going when he didn't show up. His hunger was fierce, and he was tired of being lonely. George Shannon was just a kid, barely 18 years old.
I don't know if that happened right here at Bow Creek. I don't know that anyone knows exactly where all of that happened. But this shot, into the smoky river's bend, is big and broad enough to hold whatever imaginations I can create.
See where the land juts into the water up ahead. Poor kid might have been sitting right there when the Corps came around a bend you can't quite see. Could have. Honestly, could have.
Pardon me if I say that last one is a great picture.
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