I spent a few hours tuning skis last weekend. Who else is getting ready? Here’s a quickie from last winter at an undisclosed location deep in the New England Backcountry…
Soundtrack:
I spent a few hours tuning skis last weekend. Who else is getting ready? Here’s a quickie from last winter at an undisclosed location deep in the New England Backcountry…
Soundtrack:
Montana in High Def is the HD companion to the Ziehl’s excellent Montana Lodge Life and my own Glacier Revisited series of posts. All video and photo by Andrew Ziehl, Kelly Howie, and yours truly.
Gear List:
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…
Three days in California is not enough. It was time enough, however, for a great adventure planned out for us by our friend David, who Catherine and I met in person for the first time as he and Paul picked us up from SFO late Friday night, grabbing In and Out on the way to Sacramento. Catherine and I have both been to California before, since she’s hiked the Lost Coast and I lived there when I was much younger, but this was our first trip together to CA.
We left for Lake Tahoe the next morning, trading the 110 degree heat in the city for bluebird skies and 80 degrees in the mountains. Our goal was to go bouldering at Bliss. Catherine provided photo documentary for most of the trip.
We arrived without a guidebook and only a general idea of where to go. We pulled over, grabbed the bouldering pad, and walked right up to some incredible boulders strewn about the high Sierra terrain. We spent the afternoon clambering all over them, scouting new boulders as we went.
I captured some of our bouldering on my goPro, and sped it up. I’ve tried in the past to leave goPro on while camping, etc, but always screw it up, so it’s great to have something to look back on.
If you don’t care for video, I also snapped a few photos of the fun!
We climbed both sides of the big boulder, and though the crash pad wasn’t much use it was Type I, truly fun climbing, not grit your teeth, always about to fall climbing.
As our fingers tired and we were done baking in the sun, we headed down to the lake and jumped in. The water was crystal clear, almost Caribbean. We weren’t quite done climbing and jumping off rocks, so we wandering down the shore a ways and found a secluded spot to test the waters.
As the evening crept in, we drove down out of the mountains, though we all wanted to stay. David had other plans for us the rest of the weekend. The next day we headed for the coast north of San Fran, and stopped to boulder at a creek along the way. This time the rock was volcanic and blocky, and the water was even colder and more refreshing.
Later that afternoon we were at Mt. Tamalpais, and drove down for dinner on Stinson beach.
, Mt. Tam environs.
We camped out on top of Mt. Tam, and hung around for a bit in the morning. We considered trying to rent some surfboards since a number of people were tout on the water, but decided better of it. Instead, we headed back to San Francisco for a bit of city tourism before our flight out. Thanks David, Paul and Ian, for a great trip!