Tim Ernst is back with a slew of publications for Arkansas outdoor recreationalists and nature enjoyers. The trail guide author, landscape and wildlife photographer took a five-year break after his last book, but now copies of his new picture book, Arkansas: Just Waterfalls – The Trail Guide Companion and his celebratory coffee-table book, Arkansas Nature Photographer: My Fiftieth Anniversary, all now on sale.
Ernst is also traveling around the region, speaking about the new books and reflecting on his five decades of shooting and exploring the natural world. Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis invited Ernst to the Bruce and Anne Applegate News Studio One for more reflection. The author says he can remember when his photography career began and the impact his time at the University of Arkansas had on that trajectory.
Tim Ernst: I was not a very good student. I was lazy, and I just, I don’t know, I've always been of the outdoors. I grew up outdoors hunting and fishing and stuff, and my brother-in-law gave me a camera. He was coming back from the Vietnam War and I bought a what was titled as a Girl Watcher lens in a photography magazine for $45.49, which was a lot of money for me back then in nineteen seventy-five, but it was a four-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, and the first thing I did with that lens is I ran out literally at the we lived over near, um, on the north side of Fayetteville, and I hiked up to the top of Township Road, where there was a clear view to the west, and I photographed a sunset, and I was immediately hooked on taking pictures of the outdoors with that moment.
And it wasn’t so much the picture, because I didn’t get to see the picture until the film was processed, but it was just the experience. Just really something grabbed a hold of me, but it wasn’t until a couple of months later that I literally answered an ad in the Arkansas Traveler paper from the University of Arkansas that said guaranteed income for taking pictures of beautiful women. I was extremely shy, wasn’t dating anybody, and I was just an outdoor kind of geek back then, and I signed up the next day. I became a professional photographer, and I started a business called Photographs Unlimited in Fayetteville, taking sorority and fraternity party pictures. So that was the wildlife stage of my career. And one thing led to another from that, and I gravitated towards being able to see myself making money or surviving as being outdoors, taking pictures because I was terrified of being around people. And so that business kind of gave me the foundation financially so that I could get out and spend time working in the woods instead of in front of people.
Jack Travis: Yeah. And can you tell me about your first book once you did get to go back out into the woods and start photographing out there?
Ernst: Well, the first book, uh, was a little while coming along in 1981, we started the Ozark Highlands Trail Association, a volunteer club to build the Ozark Highlands Trail. And that was very successful. But as we were building it, there was no information about it. The Forest Service didn’t provide any information, no signs or anything. And so as we built new sections of trail, I hired an artist here in Fayetteville to draw a map that I published of what was to be and then what we had constructed already. And that map kind of served as the basis for the future of guidebooks. And the main thing there was Backpacker Magazine published an article in 1983 about this new long-distance hiking trail being built in Arkansas. And they used my pictures and it was my story, which is the first story I ever wrote about anything. So I didn’t know what I was doing at all, but at the very end of it, there was a little blurb that said, if you want a map of this trail, send four dollars to Tim Ernst in Fayetteville. And I got over ten-thousand orders from that one article.
And so when I sent the maps out, I also sent out a membership application to our volunteer hiking club. And that sort of formed the basis of a broader membership for our volunteer club. And we still have many of those people that signed up then are still coming to Arkansas once every year to help do trail maintenance and hike the trail and stuff like that. So that was, uh, that was the first publishing thing that I did. And in 1988, we completed the trail that we had first started to do. And so it was time to do a guidebook of it. And that was the first of my many guidebooks that I’ve done.
Travis: Mhm. So you started off doing exclusively photography, but then with this map you wrote a little bit.
Ernst: Yes.
Travis: Then in the guidebook you wrote some more. How has your uh in addition to your photography, how has your writing evolved over your career?
Ernst: Well, I don’t think my writing has evolved. I’m not a very good writer. I mean, doing the guidebooks was easy. I literally would push a measuring wheel along in front of me because I’m a stickler for accuracy, for mileage and distances. And I would talk into a tape recorder and basically describe the route that I was doing. And I’d come to an intersection, turn left or right, and I would basically transcribe those later on. And, and then I would kind of shorten them and format them so they would fit into a guidebook. But that was basically technical writing, just trying to get the facts correct.
Travis: Has that process changed?
Ernst: It’s changed a little bit. It’s a lot easier now with the new waterfall guidebook update that I did, which is almost five hundred pages now. It, um, I did the same tape recording, the measuring I could do with an app on a phone and and a very good mapping software. That we all now have available to us. And so I didn’t have to do as much describing of what was what along the trail because when I would go back and listen to that, when I, when I was writing the descriptions, I could look at my track on the map and talk about how steep it was. Or you go around this bench or across that creek, stuff like that.
It was much more visual. By reviewing my track on the computer. So it made that easier. And probably along the way I also took shortcuts. Now when I’ve written the update to the waterfall guidebook, and of course, so many people have GPS and stuff on their watch and all trails and stuff like that. So they don’t need the particular descriptive things that I used to do for all the earlier work. So it’s, uh, but GPS coordinates are more important, although I think people kind of overestimate what that can actually do for them. So it's a little bit of a learning curve on the user end.
Travis: Yeah. So you have had a five-year break from photography books?
Ernst: My last one came out in 2020. Arkansas Greatest Hits, which was to be my last book and kind of a synopsis of my favorite pictures from the first 45 years. And all of those pictures had been in previous picture books of mine. That was my twentieth coffee-table picture book.
Travis: So what made this the right time to come out and publish your fiftieth-anniversary book? Like, you know, it’s not a greatest hits. It's all new. But what made right now a good time to bring this out?
Ernst: Well, a couple of things. One of them was that since I was a little kid, I always wanted to have a 50th anniversary of something. It was at first a wedding anniversary. And my, my lovely bride and I have been married 25 years now, so technically there’s still a chance I’ll make that. But I’ll be 96 or something like that on our anniversary night, and I don’t think it’ll be very exciting the way our anniversaries used to be by the end. But I could still make it.
But when I kind of hung things up after 45 years, you know, I really wanted to keep going till 50th. But things were changing and, and it just seemed like it was time to make a change then. And my wife and I, who 've always done all of our own publishing, all of our own distribution, and at one time we had sixteen, eighteen different books in print. And actually, we still do, most of them being guidebooks, because all of my original picture books are out of print except one, and we just recently reprinted one of them. But we try to keep the guidebooks in print, but it was becoming more of a physical issue for both of us to literally handle these forty- and fifty-pound cases of books and send them out to distributors. So we actually turned the distribution of part of our business to the University of Arkansas Press. And so they do all of that now and which took all the day-to-day stuff out of us. And it was time to kind of sit back and breathe a little bit.
Travis: Hmm. Can you tell me about the process by which you gathered all of these photos? Um, how long did it take from start to finish
Ernst: For the new book, the new fiftieth anniversary, I immediately got a new camera after I’d sold all my equipment after the previous book five years ago. And it was really just to have something that I could take pictures with rather than a phone. And over the course of a year or two, I ended up being frustrated with the little light camera that I had purchased so I could carry it around and my ailing back could handle the weight. And I was still getting out and doing things, but the pictures weren’t what I was hoping for or what I was expecting from real expensive fancy equipment. And so I ended up with the kind of yearning to do it right. If I’m going to be out there doing it, I might as well do it right and get more serious about it.
So I started spending more time with targeted taking pictures instead of just casually, oh, there’s a good shot, let’s stop and take a picture of it. And I also started to work more seriously on the Arkansas Waterfall Guidebook update, which required going back to a lot of places I’d found years and years ago, but didn’t have good pictures of. And so that fueled my desire to get out and take pictures. And the more I got out, it’s addictive to me. And the last couple years especially, I got back into real serious, big and expensive camera equipment and was able to pair my system down to where I could still hike, not all day with a fifty pounds camera gear, but I could pare it down to fifteen or eighteen pounds and I could hike in as far as I needed to. Someplace to be there when, when the light was right.
But it wasn’t really until this last year that I spent much more time focusing on trying to get new pictures. All along, I tried to get out and shoot enough pictures so that I could put together a calendar, a wall calendar for Arkansas every year, which is only thirteen or fourteen pictures. But I always did that. So I had some of those to call back up and, and the new waterfall pictures that I took for this, this new book, there’s so many incredible waterfalls in Arkansas and so many of them I’ve been to before, but not under good conditions. And so after I turned seventy, actually, I made some of the very difficult hikes in this new waterfall guidebook. Well, I made all of the difficult ones since I turned seventy, just to make sure they could be done by normal people. And the pictures just kept getting better and better and better because of the season. We had a really good waterfall season last spring and early summer, and that just kind of led from one thing to another.
And it wasn’t until after I got the waterfowl guidebook done. After four months, my wife and I were locked in a shed, literally in Colorado and worked on this book. All the technical things my wife did with the maps and stuff like that, drew all that. And I was having to write descriptions and stuff and go through the pictures. But when I got it done, it was like, wow, there’s so many great pictures, so many great waterfalls. I ended up making a picture book of just the new waterfalls out of that one. And so that’s that’s a new picture book, Arkansas Just Waterfalls picture book.
Travis: So we have the books in front of us. Uh, both your fiftieth anniversary book and the third edition of Arkansas Waterfalls, with all of those new pictures. Um, could you maybe take one of the books and show us a picture and describe the targeting nature of it? Right. You just use that word, you’re you’re you’re becoming more target. You were becoming more targeted about the shots you were taking.
Ernst: Well, okay, the cover of it, uh, of the Arkansas Nature Photography fiftieth anniversary is one. So I love Arches National Park in Utah. I first photographed there a long, long time ago, long before it was popular. And what I wanted to do was go to one of the arches, Delicate Arch. Their license plate has been there for a long time now, but nobody knew about it back then. And I wanted to go up there and take pictures at night. At the ranger station, they thought it was very strange. Why would you want to go out there at night? Now, it’s so crowded at night out there with nighttime photographers. They actually don’t allow a lot of stuff to happen then, but they ended up giving me permission, a permit to park overnight. And so I just, I and they said, and we don’t know where you are so have at it. So I went and spent the night at Delicate Arch and I’ve always loved arches.
We don’t have very many of them in Arkansas. Most of them are natural bridges, but the cover picture is one of Buffalo Arch, which is down on the Buffalo River, the lower part of the river in the wilderness area, lower Buffalo Wilderness. And it’s very interesting. It’s within fifty feet of the river itself. And you could float right past this and never see it. I’d never seen a picture of it until just recently. And so I went down and found it and thought when I got there, I immediately had the picture that’s on the cover of the book in my mind. And I came back to it two or three times, um, and camped there with a tent that I actually used in 1980 and ‘81 to backpack across the United States with, with a group of people, American Hiking Society hiking group. And that’s the exact tent that that was and it’s just got a little light in it and it’s glowing and the glow from inside the tent lit up the underneath part of the arch. And so that was something that I kind of as soon as I saw that, I got to figure out how to make that happen. And so a lot of the nighttime pictures that I take take more mental effort, because you don’t just walk up and say, oh, that’s nice, and take a picture of it, like you can do so in the daytime. So that’s one.
And there’s another picture similar to that. It’s actually the cover of the twenty twenty six calendar. And it’s a pretty difficult place to get to. It’s sort of a social media darling right now called Thunderbird Cave. And I don’t like to copy people or or I’m not much of a social media person, but when I saw that, I knew that I wanted to go see what it looked like in person. And when I finally got there, this is a picture that you see on the cover that I had in my head, oh, I need to get another tent, because I had to use a smaller tent because there’s not much room, and I wanted to take it at night, and it had to be this and this and this and this, and it ended up taking me five trips to this place in order to get the conditions that I wanted to take this picture, which is basically a snapshot once I got there, but for those trips were in and out at night. And for those who have been to Thunderbird Cave, you probably understand what it took to do that. It’s pretty difficult to get to.
Travis: And that kind of brings me to my next question. Honestly, speaking of arches, these photos of, specifically the tent under Buffalo Arch or in Thunderbird Cave, you know, you’ve photographed a lot of places that people might not have known otherwise and could perhaps have introduced people to these places. They might have gone out themselves. Do you feel that there’s a tension between being a published landscape photographer and navigating overcrowding in our natural places? Do you find that you have to navigate that at all?
Ernst: No. Not really. You know, back in the early days when I was just doing guidebooks and of course publishing pictures in picture books. I mean, yeah, people say, oh gosh, I wonder where that is. And that’s usually about as far as it went. Nowadays, if I take a picture of something, people are going to figure out where it is just by social media or whatever. But everybody goes everywhere. And so it’s very difficult to find places that are totally secret. And my thinking about that early on and advertising trails, doing trail guidebooks is kind of different because trails actually are better off because people use them. If people don’t use hiking trails, they’re just in the Ozarks. They’re just going to grow closed. So we need people on the trails.
And overall, as far as pictures of wilderness areas and stuff, I was involved in the 1984 Arkansas Wilderness Act and have always been for protecting places. And to me, this kind of work, it's kind of a double-edged sword, but one of them is that we need people to be aware and appreciate these beautiful places so that they will understand how important they are to be protected. And I used to lead a lot of hikes with the Ozark Highlands Trail Association and that was the very thing there to try and grow the crowd, grow the base of people that love to get out and hike so that they could help us build the trail, of course, but also so that they would help maintain it and bring their kids out and their grandkids out. And so to continue doing that. And it’s kind of the same thing with scenic areas. To me, people are going to find these places. They belong to all of us. So I mean, I only do things that are on public property and accessible and there are a couple places that I’ve known about for a long time and I haven’t published. I haven’t published pictures of them until somebody else has, and they’ve put it in guidebooks, or they’ve put it on social media and it’s like, okay, it’s okay for me to now go out and do that.
So that’s the other side of it is, you know, sometimes I kind of hide in the shadows and let somebody else take the blame for it. But I really do think that, um, waterfalls, for example, for a long time, my waterfall guidebook, they were a couple hundred waterfalls in there, and those were being visited a lot, which and it’s kind of funny because a lot of them, there were no trails and now there are trails to them, easy to follow trails to them. There are social trails that right now especially developed very quickly. And that’s okay. But, um, people are going to the same ones over and over and over again. There’s more than two hundred new ones in this guidebook. And so that’s going to spread out the usage. It’s going to take people to places other than Lost Valley and Hemmed-in Hollow and Triple Falls and places that are getting crowded.
And along the way, like for the two hundred that are new ones that are in that guidebook, there’s probably a thousand along the way that they’re passing or that are in that little drainage over there. And that one, you know, just above it. And so it’s going to lead people into new areas and to new things that become, wow, look at that one. I bet that one’s not named. Ernst doesn’t have it in his book. And Ernst only has a limited number in his book. There are literally thousands of waterfalls in Arkansas. Nobody will ever see them all. None of them are going to ever be in a book or on a web page. Um, and so there’s plenty of plenty to explore.
Author and photographer Tim Ernst speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis earlier this week. You can visit TimErnst.com for links to his new books and a schedule of his speaking engagements through early 2026.
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