Having grown up in Calgary, I’d done a LOT of hiking in the Canadian Rockies in the SUMMER.
But for the past 3 years I’ve stayed in Banff for Spring skiing and Spring hiking.
Hiking in March / April was NEW to me.
Each time I stayed in the Samesun Hostel, the best overall of 3 good hostels in Banff.
I learned the hard way trying Sundance Canyon that micro spikes are essential for hiking ice. I backtracked to town and bought Yaktrax. An excellent product.
This over-the-top video by Bashir Abu Shakra won the 2022 Skypixel Drone Grand Prize. It features some stunning footage from the Alps, Brazil, and Mongolia.
We ate most of our meals at the house. One restaurant blowout was hosted at Zac’s.
The infamous mountain bike circuit is called Slickrock Trail. I survived it in 2007 and did NOT want to risk a second time. BUT some of our group cycled it safely. Jeni and I hiked Slickrock.
I’m typically the guy who says: “Why carry a nail? It’s too heavy! … We probably won’t need it on this trip.” 😀
#FamousLastWords
The proverb is found in a number of forms, beginning as early as the 13th century.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Related sayings are “A stitch, in time, saves nine” and “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.
Once I bought a cheap flight to Lisbon, I found the fuel canister I needed in a hostel FREE BOX. So I know they exist on the Canary Islands.
They MIGHT be for sale from either Leroy Merlin or Decathlon in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. Some have found them at petrol stations and ferreterias, hardware stores.
My goal in hiking is to ENJOY the experience as much as possible.
High altitude mountaineers suffer — the opposite.
I finally got around to watching Meru, the 2015 documentary film about climbing the Shark’s Fin route in the Indian Himalayas.
Mainly because I really admire Jimmy Chin, the best climber of all-time who can ALSO film his adventures.
In 2008 Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and new guy Renan Ozturk almost made the first ascent of the infamous Shark’s Fin. It was harsh. They suffered physically and psychologically.
Before their next attempt in 2011, both Chin and Ozturk (separately) suffered horrific climbing falls. Somehow Jimmy popped out of a monster avalanche suffering barely a scratch.
Watching the movie, everyone agrees Renan should not be going back to Meru. He suffers a minor stroke during the second climb.
Jimmy’s master work was the Academy Award winning Free Solo. (2018)
This one is no Free Solo. But it did keep me gripped from start to finish.
“Meru is the anti-Everest,” says mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer. “This climb has seen more attempts and more failures than any peak in the Himalaya.”
Krakauer commentary throughout was a highlight for me.
When pandemic cancelled all my travel and Gymnastics coaching gigs, I took the time to improve my video editing. It’s become my main hobby.
Three phases (so far):
Learning the technology. Experimenting with different cameras. And acce$$ories.
Story. Story. Story.
My personal style.
After posting myFrench Creek tribute, I declared I was GOOD ENOUGH at video editingtechnology for my purposes. I could sit down at a table with a professional video editor and understand 75% of what they were talking about. 😀
Far more difficult is to decide on what story to tell. And to tell it effectively. Many super skillful editors struggle finding their next story.
I threw this short video together quickly as a teaser for my How to Survive theWest Coast Trail videos. But in some weird way, it’s evocative of that wild and challenging hike. It tells the story well
Putting these together is incredibly time consuming.
I kept trying to find ways to improve my efficiency. And that ended up evolving into my personal style of video — as of October 2022, at least. Who knows what’s next? 😀
I posted Valencia, Spain in January 2022. My edits today are all similar. But I’m adding more personal drone footage rather than drone stock video.
What is my style?
Music driven
Landscape, not vertical (portrait)
Cuts are mostly on the beats
Mostly hard cuts
Use transitions sparingly
Use gimmickry sparingly … though I do love speed ramps 😀
Lots of drone footage
Normally no voice over
No ads
Social media pestering only at the end.
Challenging for me is finding the right music for each story.
One of my best edits was Norway Highlights. I credit the song — Odesza Higher Ground — as once I decided on the soundtrack, it was easy to decide where to put each clip. In the example, below, the colours are music blocks to be filled with scenes I decide upon later.
Increasingly I’m picking music first, shooting the video later.
Odesza is my favourite band right now. Very popular for YouTube edits.
I’ve been studying Colour Grading through a course called … Color Grading Academy.
It’s a very complicated process.
Some of the best video editors online send out their final product for Colour experts to finish. An art, not a science.
Things I’ve decided NOT to use:
Tracking
Hue / Saturation curves
… more to be added
P.S.
I posted the Englishman River Falls hike in November 2020 and again in October 2022. I’ve definitely improved.
Click PLAY or watch the Nov 2020 edit on YouTube. I was quite happy with it. But NOW I’m wondering what weird colour grade I was experimenting with at that time. 😀
There are 3-4 different distances raced each year. Mine was shortest.
I signed up 2-days in advance of the race for the EASY 16km up and down.
It was more of a hike than a knife edge ridge.
I ended up 153rd, 1hr 44min behind the winner in the short race. My time 3hr 11min.
BUT I was happy with how I did. Running in I still felt great — avoiding muscle cramps which threatened throughout. I’d not really gone running in over a year before this day.
Louise finished ahead of me. We recovered with free vegetarian chile. So tasty, I bought some to take cycling.
In fact, at that point, Louise was wondering what happened to her brother Henry — turned out he had kept going at the short race turnaround. Henry ended up running an extra 7km or so.
Happily, his luck changed later — winning an official race hoody.
Rick McCharles 