Morris and I do 'Duck Egg'

Duck Egg County Park is not hard to find and has two entrances.  The upper entrance on the ridge and the lower entrance in the valley.

We chose to hike the lower end of the park and see if we could get some great views of the changing colors and get some shots of the Springville Branch of the Bad Axe River.

Bad Axe River...that name is just so cool.

Anyway the drive into the valley was beautiful and very very twisted.  You need good brakes and you need to be careful!

One of the more interesting things to try and do is take good photographs with a dog on a leash.

Some folks let their dogs loose but these trails are shared with equine and I really wouldn't want Morris to spook a horse.  I know I wouldn't want to be spooked.

We walked in the valley and admired the beautiful fall colors.

As an experiment I only brought my Nikon with a 50mm lens and my new pocket camera.

I however did bring my tripod in hopes of getting a nice shot of the river flowing.

We walked out to the 'big' pond where we saw a Muskrat who was rather unconcerned about us.

Morris seemed interested in the smells on the shoreline, but I wanted to keep any encounters between Muskrat and Morris to a minimum.

My biggest fear was that Morris would decide to get into the river which was running rather hard from the 1/2" of rain we had the night before.

He proved pretty smart about that.  Stuck his nose down into the river and quickly pulled back.
After that I wasn't too afraid of losing him to the swift current.

I used my very dark ND filter and was able to set up a shot by one of the foot bridges.
I let Morris loose and he stayed near.

This view is from the horse crossing.  It was a hard shot to get as the light kept changing.

Then we found a small trail that led us to the edge of the river that was off the beaten tracks.

This was a very neat spot and I would like to return without my 'helper' to worry about.
The current was running pretty hard.

Then we set up at the second bridge to take some shots.

Note that my camera assistant is making sure no one disturbs us while we are on top of the slightly bouncy bridge.  He actually stood very still so I could take some timed exposures.

What a great dog!

Facing downstream 30 second exposure.  Edited for a bit of fun.

Facing upstream.

This is the only place I regretted not having a wider angle lens.  But I still ended up happy with this shot.
Morris stood quietly while I packed my things up and we started back down the trail towards the parking lot.

Old Dog Morris was dragging his butt by the time we made it to the Subaru.

I asked him if he thought this would be a good place for him to bring his buddy Teslin.
He really didn't answer.

When he hopped into the car .... 

...he fell immediately asleep and snored most of the way home.