Got out for a hike yesterday in Prince William Forest Park, a national forest about 25 miles south of Washington, D.C. I wanted to try out the camera features on my new iPhone 12 Pro. I hiked for a couple of hours and saw no one else on the trail. I went out hoping the heavy rain on the previous day would yield some nice long exposures on the many little cascades and waterfalls along Quantico Creek. I wasn’t disappointed. I parked at Lot E and went down the trail to the Quantico Falls Trail. It’s about a mile downhill to the cascades and they were running pretty well. Just upstream is the largest waterfall on in the park and it was roaring.
Quantico Falls
I used the iPhone 12 Pro along with an app called Slow Shutter to capture long exposures of the falls and cascades. It worked well with the new wide angle and zoom lenses of the iPhone.
Quantico Cascades
After photographing the falls and cascades, I headed downstream on the North Valley Trail towards the abandoned Pyrite Mine. The trail followed the creek through little groves of Mountain Laurel that should be blooming in another few weeks.
The pyrite mine operated in the late 1800s up until the early 1900s. I used to hike here as a boy and knew about the pyrite mine, but never knew why they would mine pyrite. It is commonly called fools gold and doesn’t have any industrial purpose. From the signage I learned that sulfur is embedded with the pyrite and that was really what was valuable.
All that is left now are the moss covered foundations of the mine and processing plant. Nature has reclaimed the area.
Abandoned Pyrite Mine
The trail back out to the main road and the parking lot was a very pleasant walk. I caught a nice reflection of the beech trees in a puddle on the walkout.
