A trip to Granby Connecticut to visit Ender's Falls and State Forest
Saturday turned out to be a happy accident. The plan was to capture some fall colors and perhaps see if we had gotten enough rain to make visiting Enders Falls worthwhile. I think I have visited just about all the waterfalls in Connecticut except this one. It seems like something else always seemed to come up, but not today. Today was going to be Enders come rain or shine.
While navigating to Enders Falls the GPS didn't exactly have a direct address to the park entrance for some reason but had the address to Enders State Forest. The GPS actually said in order to get to the location I had to take a route that actually was not one of my allowed types. On the way up, just before getting to the coordinates it looked like we passed a parking lot for the park on our left but we proceeded ahead since it's not uncommon for the parks in Connecticut to have two separate lots. Well when we arrived at the location I finally found out why the road type was not on my allowed list (another story for another day perhaps). It was an access road, narrow, unpaved and rocks an potholes to boot. Luckily we took Curly's SUV. It wasn't the type of off-roading that we would need to worry about for the moment. We traveled down the road for about a mile or so and pulled over. There was no sound of the falls and the waterway that was nearby was basically bone dry. So far, not good signs if this was the feed for the falls. We got back in the car and proceeded on until we came to another paved road and pulled off again to grab our bearings and figure a way to get back to the lot we had passed previously without going the way we had just come from. Once I mapped out our new route the road we were on just happened to traverse a wetlands area just as the sun was beginning to rise. I told Curly to stop the car immediately. This was the happy accident. Marsh, check. Fall color, check. Fog, check. Beaver Dam, check. Early Morning light, check. The only thing missing was a moose with a full rack! We had a good 30 minutes of great light to shoot with before the fog began to burn off.
We finally proceeded on to the proper park entrance where the roaring sound of water could be heard. Always a good sign! After a short hike into the woods we got to location only to discover about 5-6 other photographers already there. In actuality there were about 10 or so up and down the waterway. They were from the Westfield Camera club, out on a field trip learning how to use slow shutter speeds and what not. A very nice bunch! This did make for some concerted framing at times since you had to be conscience of where people were in order to exclude them or include them in your shots. Overall it was a fun morning. We will need to return when the water levels are higher, you could tell by the rock formations that even though there was a pretty descent flow the levels are much much higher. I was happy however and very glad. The GPS seemed to know exactly what I was looking for that day, even if I didn't. As always, get some sleep you've got plenty of shooting to do!
