Gauley River

We took a short trip up to the Gauley river yesterday to hike and play in the water.  We stopped at Smithers and picked up one of our cousins so she could go with us.

It's funny how that sometimes when something happens that's aggravating at first, then once you think about it it's not aggravating at all.

Kim was laying out on a rock and I asked her to hold my knife while I got in the water and swam a bit.  After we had hiked back to the truck and were getting ready leave, I said "Hey Kim, wheres my knife?"  Doh!  It was still on the rock in the river.  That was the aggravating part.

Here's the good part.  While we were hiking out Molly wanted to run but I didn't want to leave Kim and Brooke, so when we discovered my knife was still at the river Molly and I got to run back and get it.   I figured it was just a little less than a mile to where my knife was, so we made it a race against the clock.  We ran across an old railroad bridge that the NPS has converted to a pedestrian bridge, then up the railroad and across another bridge, then down a trail to the river.  We made it there and back in 19 minutes.  It was a fun run through some pretty woods.

For photo nerds, the picture of the river was taken with the Canon 17-40 mm lens with a 10 stop neutral density filter and a circular polarizing filter.  The exposure time was 75 seconds at f/8.  You can't get exposure times that long in the afternoon without the black glass of the neutral density filter.