This set is from the first day of my trip. My first stop was the Mina Sauk Falls Trail at Taum Sauk Mountain. This trail is about a 3 mile loop. The falls are about 1.2 miles into the trail. The trail starts as a simple paved path and gradually gets more and more difficult to the point where you are jumping from rock to rock. The day I was there it was raining pretty steadily, which made for an active falls. There are a couple spots in the trail where it opens up and you get some great views of the mountainside.

On the second day of my trip I woke up early to get some shots of the sunrise. While there were not enough clouds in the sky to get the sunrise I was looking for, I did get a couple decent shots. I did some creative editing on a couple of them to show the land and trees as a silhouette to the sunrise in the background. The interesting part of the morning was that I took these shots from the crater that was left over from the Civil War battle of Fort Davidson in 1864. After holding off the Confederate forces for a couple days, the Union commander secretly evacuated the fort at night then detonated an underground black powder storage to destroy the fort and prevent the Confederate forces from advancing on St. Louis.

On the second day of my trip I headed out to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park in the morning. There was still some fog coming across the mountains. Due to the rain from the previous days the Shut-Ins were pretty active. I setup a tripod at the main lookout area and got some shots with my 18-250mm lens. A couple of them are the same shot but at different shutter speeds to show the water in different ways. I also took a few shots with an 8mm fisheye lens. There are 2 aerial shots that I took from my DJI Mavic Pro, but I had forgotten to bring my memory card that morning so they are lower quality because it had to record directly to my phone. One interesting thing was that since the Taum Sauk reservoir failure in 2005 that spilled over a billion gallons of water into the Shut-Ins, they have put in an emergency siren and escape route which takes you about 200 steps up the mountain from the lookout platform.

In the afternoon on the second day of my trip, I went back to Taum Sauk Mountain. This time I only went about 3/4 mile down the Mina Sauk Falls Trail to a place where there was a big opening. I setup my tripod and got some shots of the mountainside and LOTS of fall colors. I also used the fisheye lens on a few shots to get a really wide view. I was going to try to get some aerial shots but the wind was too high that day. I finished up the day at the Ameren Lower Reservoir. I found a decent spot to get some sunset shots but by that time the cloud cover had gotten too thick. I did some creative editing but the sunset shots were not quite what I wanted them to be.

This set is from the third day of my trip. This is Elephant Rocks State Park. The day was pretty overcast with brief moments of sunshine. This made for some pretty dull water shots so I had to make some brush enhancements on those shots. One of the fascinating parts of this park was one of the back trails that led to the remains of an Engine House built in the 1890's that was used for maintenance on train engines. The hand-built stone walls are incredible and extremely well built.