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On April 6th and 7th 0f 2018 I was invited to ride with my brother at his annual Jeep trip at Hot Springs ORV Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The ride was hosted by Central Mississippi Jeep Association. This event happens every spring usually in April and most members of the group come rain or shine. This year, it rained, sleeted and snowed most of the weekend. During this trip I was able to photograph many of the vehicles and members riding the trails, crawling over giant rocks, and playing in the mud. Today I wanted to share with you some of the images from that trip. I call this trip a Weekend With Central Mississippi Jeep Association at Hot Springs ORV Park.
Hot Springs ORV Park
Hot Springs ORV Park was originally called Superlift Offroad Vehicle Park but at some in the past few years the place was sold to another group. The park is awesome with plenty of places for all types of offroad vehicles to play. Most of the trails are marked 1 through 5 diamonds and they are right on the money. If the trails are muddy or its raining, add another diamond or two to the trail.
If you have an offroad vehicle that you want to test its ability at rock crawling and climbing muddy and rocky hills, I highly recommend it.
If you are wanting to stay cheap, the park offers primitive campsites (raised gravel bed to place your tent and fire ring), powered and non power spots for RVs and Trailers, and several large multi bunk cabins. Just a few minutes away there a few hotels you can stay at.
For more information, check out their website for location, daily rates and hours of operation.
A Weekend With Central Mississippi Jeep Association at Hot Springs ORV Park – Back Story
Hot Springs, Arkansas is about 4 and half hours from my house in Blue Ridge, Texas. So making this trip isn’t to bad. For this type of trip I would either take Thursday off and take my time getting to Hot Springs. Maybe do a little rural exploring along the way or find some hiking trails in the national forests to explore. If I leave Friday, then I get up 6 hours before I have to be there.
For this trip, I had to work on Thursday. The weather looked great and it looked like it might a warmer trip this year. But as we got closer to the date of the trip the weather started to get worse. Lots of rain, cold weather and maybe even some snow.
When Friday came along I got up around 4 am and got in my car without checking the weather. About an hour out from Hot Springs the weather turned nasty. It was a down pour so bad I could only travel about 50 mph on and off into Hot Springs.
After getting there, I changed in my cold weather wet gear and packed my camera gear into my brother’s Jeep. Luckily about an hour into the ride the rain slowed enough with the help of the pine trees I was able to get my camera gear out and start shooting the rigs.
The trails were nasty. Many of the trails had shallow ankle deep fast flowing water cascading down the mountain trails and across the slick rock. The granite rock was so slippery that simple rock trails were an issue for Jeeps that could easily pass the trails on a dry day.
On our last day we woke up to 30 to 32 degree weather. We started with snow that let to heavy sleet, to wintery mix, back to snow, and then rain again. At about 4 pm the weather cleared and we had a beautiful afternoon in the mountains.
A Weekend With Central Mississippi Jeep Association at Hot Springs ORV Park – About the Pictures
This is my second time to attempt to photograph the rock clawers in action. It was my first time to photograph in low light, rainy conditions. I took roughly 800 pictures and only have looked through about 100 of them. I have finished editing about 20 images. Today I wanted to share with you 10 of those images. Later, I’ll share some more. At some point I plan on revisiting the other images that I considered second class and see if those turn out.
The pictures were shot by hand using my secondary camera. Its an old Nikon d5000 and a NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G. I then edited the images with Adobe Lightroom, Google Nik Collection to remove noise and clean up the images. For some images I may have used Topaz Labs to enhance the images.
The images in this set are from Saturday afternoon. Its a mixture of pictures of the group and some of my brother and our friend Mike in his Toyota Pickup. This weekend I will be working on more images and video from the rest of the trip.
I’m trying to get into Offroad Photography and currently taking new clients for these types of events. Since I’m just getting starting, my rates for this type work is a lot lower. Please contact me, if you are wanting bring me a long on your tip.
As always my pictures are available for print and digital download with or without the watermark. Please contact me for details.
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