Tag Archives: Jay Peak

Overkill!

For everyone who has ever asked, “Didn’t you just go [hiking|skiing|biking|rafting|kayaking|insert outdoors sport of choice here]?”  Well here is my response.  And you may (in fact I encourage you to) quote me on this.

This represents the first ‘lengthy’ video I’ve done in quite a while.  After roughly a year of considerable slacking, and the associated accumulation of interesting footage, I decided enough was enough.  No point in owning two GoPros and two expensive point-and-shoots without ever doing anything cool with the footage.  In the end, this video uses on the the Hero 3 Black and HD Hero footage – the rest of the stills I’m saving for subsequent projects.

One of my goals for this project was to collect up all of the clips which were cool but did not really warrant a standalone treatment.  Additionally, I really wanted to focus on quality over quantity.  I settled on a thematically appropriate soundtrack which was only moderately long and lent itself to the ‘story’ being told.  With the intent of producing what is essentially a mashup of miscellaneous old footage, a moderately long soundtrack should let me cram in a lot of random stuff without feeling the need to add filler or fade out the music after I’ve run our of exciting footage.  The numerous ‘false endings’ provide the ability to naturally segment the clips and offer some periodic changes in tempo.  Also, it’s Motorhead.  Seriously, there is not enough classic heavy metal in action sports or pop culture, or really anywhere…

Little Jay

This past weekend Mother Nature continued to bless us with a moderate “refresher” snowfall.  After lapping it up in the Jay inbounds, Kelly and I decided to mosey over to Little Jay in search of some untracked.  With the internet yielding a surprising lack of trip reports concerning our objective, we really were just winging it.  From asking around, we determined that we should park at the Big Jay parking lot, cross the street and follow a pretty obvious skin track up the mountain.  Armed with this scant intel, we set off in search of pow.

The skin track was well traveled and easy going the entire way up.  It brought us within about 50 vertical feet of the summit before dense foliage and steep, deep powder halted us.  We took in the view for a bit before descending.

littlejay

After a good look at the map and our surroundings, we realized that the only real way to screw up is to head too far toward skiers right, or W-SW off of the summit.  Such a course would dump you in the wrong drainage, a bit of a hike from the parking area and through who knows what sort of bushwhack.

We decided to trend a bit toward skiers right for a short distance and then push back toward the left of East, toward the two streams which would certainly deliver us back to the parking area.  In general I think this was the right idea, but we ended up too far into the stream bed which peters out into a bit of a mellow bushwhack.  In hindsight the best skiing would probably have been to skier’s right or West of the the stream bed.  The slopes in this region were tracked but plenty soft and getting free refills throughout the weekend.

Kelly gettin' deep!

Kelly, gettin’ deep!