February 23, 2008 - I updated my Upper Michigan and Other Waterfalls galleries in my Pictures Sale section. I also updated my Waterfall Photography page.
January 13, 2008 - If you enjoy shopping online, please help support this site by clicking the merchant banners on the left side of my homepage. Any purchases made go to help supporting this website and will be much appreciated.
November 25, 2007 - I recently added about 83 of my most favorite pictures to my www.flickr.com account under profile id nickp_63 and this address http://www.flickr.com/photos/escapingtoparadise/ . If you have a Flickr account you can make comments on other member's photos. Therefore, if anyone who enjoys my website and already has a Flickr account, don't hesitate to show me your waterfall or landscape photos.
November 5, 2007 - I recently returned from a Michigan Upper peninsula waterfall tour on October 11th. I went there for fall foliage colors, but witnessed fall floods due to excessive rains in September and early October in the UP. Most of the waterfall pictures I took were at excessively high water flows and about 25% of them were done with an umbrella over my camera in a light rain.
The weather for the first three days of our trip was in the high 70's, but for the last 3 days, the temperatures dropped to the high 40's!
The first day driving to the UP, my friend Harry and I visited Pictured Rocks by taking a boat tour for almost three hours. I thought they were going to take us to Spray falls, but one of the captains said they usually just turn around at Chapel rock and return to shore. He said Spray falls was another 15 minutes to reach and they only go there as a bonus if the weather is nice and the waves aren’t too high.
The next day we visited waterfalls from the Black River area including Conglomerate, Potawatomi, Gorge, Sandstone, Rainbow, Gabbro and Powderhorn.
It's hard to find the trail to Powderhorn falls, but actually it's just before Powdermill Creek Resort. I followed the trail until I could see a smaller 8 foot upper falls and then saw some ropes tried to some trees to get down by the river for a better view of the main larger falls. However, the water levels in the river were much higher than normal because of the recent hard rains, so I decided not to climb down the rope. It looked like I would have to wade in this rapids like river to get a shot of this falls and I thought it would be too dangerous. If you're pressed for time and want to stay out of danger, I would skip this falls.
When I visited Gabbro falls, I was delighted to see how beautiful it was, but at the same time I was disappointed about the massive water flow I encountered from the recent hard rains. I couldn't use my tripod because the spray from the falls was hard to avoid and the sun was out too. I'll try to get a better slow shutter shot next time the water flow is back to normal.
I didn't get a picture of Rainbow falls the last time I visited the Black river in September of 2005 because it was raining hard. This time I went to the other side of the river to get a better view of the falls, but all I got was this massive flow of water like it was a mini Niagara Falls.
On day three, we went to Lake of the Clouds, then visited the following waterfalls Bonanza, Manabezho, Manido, Nawadaha, and the footbridge river potholes. I couldn't see the potholes because of the tremendous water flow, but you should be able to find some pictures of them doing a Google search for "Presque Isle River Potholes." Here's the disappointing picture I got:
On day four, we visited the following waterfalls: Cascade, Yondota, Kakabika and Bond.
It's not hard to hike to the top of Cascade falls because the trail is less than a mile, but finding a spot to get a clear camera shot in of the front of the falls was the hard part. I was almost going to wade the river to get to the other side, but eventually, I was able to bush whack to a decent spot and setup my tripod for the picture on this site.
On Day five we visited the following waterfalls: O-kun-de-kun, Agate, Tibbets and Scott. The O-kun-de-kun falls trail was flooded the time I went and I almost changed my mind about taking the 1.3 mile hike to see the falls. However, since I'm a waterfall nut, I just walked thru the swap-like trail to see both falls. My Merrill hiking shoes were soaked, but they're made with a mesh like material for walking thru shallow streams. Unfortunately, when we checked into a hotel later that night, my socks were wet and dark brown from all the hiking.
Tibbets falls was difficult to access even after I followed the directions in Penrose's Michigan Waterfalls book. I had to park my car in front of a fallen tree on one of the dirt roads that leads to the trail of the falls. The trail to get to the falls isn't long, but hiking to the spot to get a good picture of the falls requires you to walk a dangerous narrow path and if you slip, you could slide 20 feet down to some large rocks by the river. If you're not an experienced hiker and a safety conscious person, I would advise you to skip visiting this falls.
On the last day of our trip, we drove from our Newberry hotel for about 28 miles to visit upper and lower Tahquamenon Falls. They were still offering boat rentals in the lower falls area for only 6 dollars, so we rowed our way to island to get some close up shots of the four lower falls. After the fun was over, we drove home.
My most recent pictures are now on my website and you can view them here: Upper Michigan waterfalls
August 11, 2007 - My Useful Links page has really grown in the past 4 months. In an effort to attract more visitors to my site, my recent link swapping with other sites has really paid off. When I combine the months of February and March 2007, I had a total 3184 visits to this site. Last month in July alone, I had 3800 visits on my site. Some visitors are already viewing my Art & Photography and Outdoors links pages. The travel links do have some decent Michigan related sites on it. The directories page is good if you have a website and you're looking promote it on a smaller directory that will list it for free as long as you put their site URL on your own links page. Link popularity is an important factor in showing up in Google keyword search results. I don't go on waterfall tours every month, so feel free to browse my growing useful links section because there's a lot of other decent nature photography related sites on those pages.
May 20, 2007 - I've decided to remove the hit counter from my website because the visitor statistics were much lower than what was shown in my Lunarpages web stats report. It seems like each time I would update my website with a new link exchange, it would keep resetting the hit counter back to zero or to what it was the last time updated my site. According to the Lunarpages web stats for my site, I've had about 10,000 visitors in 2007 alone and that's much higher than the 7188 number that was on my hit counter from when my site began in January of 2006. I'm not sure what to believe and don't want to waste any more time troubleshooting the issue.
February 11, 2007 - Since investing in mutual funds is one of my hobbies and it's a way I help finance my trips to visit waterfalls, I thought it would be helpful to others who want to learn more about this subject if I wrote about my investment experience. I think investing in mutual funds is a good way to create wealth over the long term for your children's education, retirement and have that extra money to travel. Click on the link below:
January 5, 2007 - Now I'm starting to get comments in my public guestbook, but it's all SPAM! My guestbook is for feedback about my website, not for links to adult content webcams or other non-waterfall related advertisements! I will erase all SPAM from my guestbook log files on the server and if it continues to be a problem, I will remove the public guestbook feature from my site. I put in a lot of work into learning how to photograph waterfalls and putting this website together, so please do not disrespect my efforts.
December 30, 2006 - I was having problems with my public guestbook working after I changed some words on the page and when I republished my website, it erased the 5 entries I had after a few weeks of having it up. It seems to be working now, so please leave some comments if you enjoyed my site or if you have suggestions for improvement. It would be nice to know what state my visitors are from.
October 14 - 18, 2006 - I was thinking about going to another state for fall foliage because the weather channel website said Michigan's UP was past peak, but I went there anyways. I first stopped at Scott falls since it's right off the road on M-28 before I went to L'Anse on October 14. The Baraga county area got hit with about 6 inches of snow! I went to see Falls River and Canyon falls, but I didn't want to hike very far because of all the snow covering the trails. I tried to hike to Gomanche falls, but I couldn't see the trails with all the snow and I think I was on private property, so I just went back to my car after walking thru the snow for about 30 minutes. I then went to Canyon falls and managed to see the main one, but skipped the other two because of the snow.