Spelunking the Gourd

For a week and a half, I've been carving pumkins for "The Great Pumpkin Blaze" being held in Croton-on-Hudson at the Van Cortlandt Manor. The event consists of an arrangement of 3,000 jack o' lanterns installed around the Manor grounds. Along with approximately 15 other carvers, four of whom are fellow Beacon area artists, and many volunteer scoopers, we have been mowing through the pumpkins for a week and a half. In the first two days, we jammed through almost a thousand simple jack o' lanterns. Unfortunately, after the deluge of rain a week ago, most of the work from the early days quickly became moldy and rotten.
The rain returned at the end of the week, and we carved in torrential conditions for almost 3 full days. Not easy, or very comfortable. The Blaze was open to the public this past weekend, and the coming weekend. We will still have a fair amount of work in the next week replacing pumpkins in preparations for next weekend. I hope to have a few photos of the installation at night. I caught a glimpse of it Friday before complete darkness, it looked cool. The kids coming through the site were very excited.
Matt Kinney experimenting with a new look

With all the rain we received this week, there has been alot of flooding. This summer has been very dry, and we have almost made up for it in one week. I shot some images of the falls here in Beacon today. There were many leafpeekers in town this weekend, but with the foliage color behind schedule, it seems the falls became a second draw for spectators. As of last week, there was very little water between the rocks in the falls, and the spillway wall was clearly visible as water barley spilled over. This week, however, all that is visible is the violent rushing of a huge amount of water. It's impressive, almost mesmerizing, to stand on the bridge or on the railroad tracks and getting lost in the site.