Compared to the aspen groves in the Rockies or the large deciduous forests in the north east, Oregon isn’t particularly known for its fall color. However, just because it doesn’t blanket the countryside doesn’t mean that pockets of great fall color don’t exist in Oregon. Many towns have planted maple, ash, birch, alder and elm trees, creating capsules of reds, yellows and oranges within city limits. There are also numerous parks and Asian gardens around the state that are brilliant in the fall. One of the best places to search out fall color is along the banks of mountain streams, lakes and rivers.

In southern Oregon, one of the best shows of fall flare is along the upper Rogue River between Prospect and Union Creek early in the month of October. The conifer forest that lines Hwy. 62 is full of dogwood which turns pleasant but subdued hues of red and orange. The real show is to be found right on the river banks where the vine maples can make it look like the forest is on fire. The Rogue River Trail follows the Rogue River along this entire section and makes for excellent hiking in the fall when the temperatures are cool and the air is crispy. However, keep in mind that fall color season is also deer hunting season, so wear bright colors, announce yourself as you hike and be prepared to see camouflaged sportsmen toting rifles coming out of the underbrush.

To get to the upper Rogue River, take Hwy. 62 from Medford. You can also get there coming the other way on Hwy. 62 from Fort Klamath or on Hwy 138 which runs between Roseburg and Hwy 97. Accessing the trail is easy. Several side roads along Hwy. 62 between Prospect and Union Creek provide access to the river and the trail. Traveling from Prospect the river is off the left side of the highway. The roads that will take you down to the river are River Bridge, Woodruff Bridge and Natural Bridge. On each of these roads the river is two miles or less from hwy. 62. Where each road meets the river there is a parking area and access to the Rogue River Trail. The distance on the trail between each of the three roads is about four miles. The distance from River Bridge all the way up to Union Creek is between 15 and 20 miles, but it is very easy to day hike shorter sections of trail. For shorter hikes or with a single car it is great to make one or two mile, out-and-back treks. In this way it is possible to hike a section of trail from each of the bridges in a single day, covering a fair portion of the river. With two cars you can also leave a shuttle and hike point to point as far as you like.The trail is mostly flat as it follows the river and never strays far from the river bank.

My favorite section of the trail is upstream from River Bridge where it ducks through glowing tunnels of vine maple and stands of large fir trees. Along sections that have a view up and down the river both banks are fringed with reds and oranges bright enough to hurt your eyes. After about two and a half miles you arrive at Takelma Gorge. At more than a mile long and, in places, only 20 feet wide and 80 feet deep, the gorge is a fantastic geological feature. Take care along this section. The trail follows the rim of the gorge, there are no railings or signs and many of the rocks are moss covered and slick. A fall into the rapids below would be nearly impossible to survive. In most places the water carved canyon is so deep and narrow that it isn’t possible to see down to the bottom. Along the gorge itself the fall color isn’t particularly dense, but there are some great patches close by.

One of the most visited spots on the river is Natural Bridge. As the name implies, the entire river flows through an underground lava tube which forms a natural bridge. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per minute disappear into a large hole in the riverbed and then come bursting from the rock again a hundred feet or so down stream. There walls of the canyon at Natural Bridge are mostly basalt rock, so there aren’t many trees with color growing near the river, but a short hike upstream or downstream will reveal more crimson and yellow lined banks.

Just past Union Creek is the Rogue River Gorge viewing area. While not as long or as deep as Takelma Gorge, the Rogue River Gorge is very dramatic, with steep basalt cliffs and a series of waterfalls entering the canyon where the terrain drops radically. The parking for the Rogue River Gorge is only a few feet off the highway and there are paved paths, railings and viewing platforms, making it an easy stop even if you are just passing through.

Past Union Creek toward Diamond Lake there is a pretty good gain in elevation and the color producing deciduous trees mostly give way to high altitude confiers and the color becomes much less intense. However, the hiking is still great and the river becomes more rugged and cascading. National Creek Falls is worth the short drive back into the woods and Muir falls makes a great five mile round trip hike.

The following is my response to a photographer friend from the UK who had some questions about photography website development. I thought my reply might be of help or interest to others so I have posted it here.

David,
Pertaining to your questions about my website, it has been a constant process of evolution over the past four or five years and it will be something I will work on my entire career, I suspect. I don’t have the money and time required to make it exactly what I envision all at once, either functionally or aesthetically, but it is slowly getting there in small increments.

I am currently getting about 6,000 to 9,000 visits per month, but it has taken me three years to get to that. Up until this time last year I was getting less than 1,000 visits per month. My goal is to get 20,000 to 40,000 visits per month eventually. My web designer and I have been implementing several different strategies. The large number of pages that are interlinked is one way. Large sites with a complex link structure and consistently new content look more important to search engines and get ranked higher. I have also done a careful job of placing key wording and metatags in various strategic places. My blog has also done a lot to increase traffic to my site. Most of it isn’t necessarily photo buyers, but at least it is creating exposure, reputation and name recognition. I also send out an email newsletter about once a month to an ever growing mailing list (up to about 600 people now).

I have also added some pages specifically for the purpose of attracting specific searches. For example, search engines were cataloging my site as an image or picture site, but not a photographer site. So, in searches for “southern Oregon photos” or “southern Oregon images” I would come up near the top, but if you searched for “southern Oregon photographer” then I was nowhere to be found. We added a random page with information about me as a photographer, where I photograph and what photography services I provide and linked it to every image in my site related to the southern Oregon region. Now when people search for a photographer in our region, my site comes up much closer to the top.

Initially, to create a large and complex page structure for my site I added tons of images, even ones that I felt were slightly sub-par. As my photography and reputation has grown, I have been slowly removing lesser images and replacing them with better ones. As I did this I realized that my website was shrinking instead of growing. This is where the idea for the stock archives came in. By creating a separate stock section I can now add tons of images that are fine for stock, but not up to the standard of “art”. I can now be much more selective about which images I place in “Signed Art” while still growing my site rapidly with “Stock”. I am just completing another round of removing about 50 lesser images from Signed Art, while adding only a few new ones, but my stock section always grows.

As I said, the main reason for adding the stock section was to increase site content, link structure and site relevance, but a side benefit has been that I now get a modest amount of stock image requests. I am by no means a stock shooter, which is why I have not pursued any of the large stock agencies like Almay. With tens of millions of images in these agencies, a stock shooter has to be producing thousands of new images a month and be willing to shoot whatever is selling in order to make a living. At one point the formula was that a good stock shooter could make an average of $1 per stock image per year. So, to make $30,000, 30,000 stock images would need to be on file and constantly updated. Now, with all the royalty free stock, it is probably far more than that. I’m not interested in going that route. Instead, my stock is targeted at a very narrow population, but one which often has difficulty finding the specific images that I have. Specifically, most of the images I license are of the local Pacific Northwest region and I license them to local or regional businesses and publishers. Even on a big site like Almay it is hard to find a good quality image of the city of Ashland or the Rogue River, so they end up finding my site and coming to me. So, the stock is a way to make my site more relevant to search engines, and it also gets me some extra income. At this point I probably license about $2,000 to $5,000 per year. As my business grows I hope that will increase.

The reason I am negotiating each stock image separately is because I haven’t been able to afford to have an automated system built for me, but hopefully that will be coming. Ideally I would make most of my images royalty free and then users could download them directly from my site. The price would be determined by the resolution and size of the image file. There may also be third party software that I could use for this for not much expense, but I haven’t had time to research it too much yet. I try to curb the time I spend working on the computer so that I remain a photographer and don’t accidentally become a web programmer.

Hope that info helps. I’m sure there are better ways of going about all this, but I just keep forging ahead without much of a blueprint. For me it is fun to experiment and see what happens. I’m in this for the long haul, so I don’t mind seeing things slowly grow and making lots of mistakes. I’m steadily becoming more known and more and more people are familiar with my work. It will be fun to see where I am in ten or twenty years.