This weeks Sunday Morning Adventure (SMA) was a trip to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park with fellow NGLFP member Gary Beasley. Kennesaw mountain and its surrounding fields and hills is the site of a major civil war battle that held off the advancing Union army in the summer of 1864. Today it is a small national park filled with locals and tourists enjoying its distant scenic views of Atlanta and the wooded trails up and around the mountain.

These two old men with tripods and heavy backpacks full of gear hiked in from the overflow parking lot at 7:30 a.m. where the temperature was already beginning to become uncomfortable.  We ascended the 0.9 mile trail up the mountain slowly (while young folks and athletic types ran around us with little effort). Near the top there was a scenic overlook and rock outcrop with Atlanta off in the distance and interesting light streaming in the trees where we paused to capture our first images. Then onto the top where there is a flat parking area and a smaller loop trail that goes up to a series of cannons mounted for display. The top trail was flatter but the areas for scenic views were  overgrown and could have benefited from a good weed whacking.  After a couple more exposures we decided to descend using the road way and had a much easier walk down than we did going up. On the way down there was another nice distant view of Atlanta with nearby industrial areas poking out among the forests and clouds in the sky were somewhat interesting for a final shot. The road down also has some nice rock walls if one would like to take the time to create some granite and plant abstracts. It might be easier to walk the road up and take the hiking trail down. For the more adventurous there are 6 and 13 mile hikes to various monuments and pigeon mountain.

Scenic views are not my normal genre so I am somewhat interested in seeing if my exposures and framing using the surrounding foliage can create the frame my minds eye saw. Sometimes I get so caught up in the overall technical steps that I forget to really see what the film will see. I personally had my share of technical challenges from leaving the shutter open before exposure to forgetting to stop down the aperture.

Side story: My first visit to Kennesaw Mountain in the 1970s. When I was a young boy scout, my troop visited the Atlanta area and hiked some at Stone Mountain and Kennesaw before heading up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. We were tired the day we hiked up Kennesaw and probably whining a bit too much. One of the scout masters told us there was a McDonalds at the top that gave out free cokes to scouts. So we ran up the mountain short cutting some of the switchback trails where we could. I can attest that there was no McDonalds at the top back then, nor is there one there now. Take a bottle of water or Gatorade with you. There is a refreshment stand in the visitors center at the bottom.

Update – of the three images I shot the two scenics did not work out since Atlanta is so far away and there is much haze. The Cannon was in a bright spot with shade all around so it was the only workable image and it needed cropping from the top to almost square format.