Moving Pictures from Moving Places: Wyoming Video

This video contains footage from our first descent of the Upper North Fork of the Little Wind, an unforgettable three day journey through the Clarks Fork Box, and the loser's bracket of the Poudre race.  While most of this has been out there for a while, the shots from the Clarks Fork hadn't really surfaced yet, and there isn't much out there video-wise of The Box.

The editing is lazy, it's a little long, there is no hip hop, no-one in this video is cool, nor are there any headcam shots.  The most you will get out of this video is a sense of how impressive Wyoming can be.  Only rivers are identified in this film.  There will be no drinking from footwear, no gang signs, no mispelling, and no teen-angst induced wrestling in the dirt.  There may be a dude in a fur coat and hotpants, though that was incidental to obtaining some good carnage shots.  Albeit a drab and lackluster attempt at videography, I gave it the old college try.

I didn't know it at the time, but this may have been the last video I ever edited.  Maybe the best way to remember the moments when you're in the thick of it is to let them grow old in your mind; to let the powerful forces in our mind re-shape these physically logical and time metered happenings into our own personal tall tales and disproportionately balanced ledgendry.  With all the video out there covering every river known to man, is the mystery and unknown essence of these places dwindling away?  Are we leaving money on the table, trading the efficacy of rich memories for the unimaginative cataloging of every metered moment?  Maybe the best video that could exist is your own recollection of the flow of time and space that you percieved in these special places.  You can't edit that into being.  You can't warp space and time with a video camera.  That's the problem.  That's not to say that there aren't some truly artful video creations out there, specific to kayaking as well.  But this video isn't art.

Sometimes a video can help you re-live an experience.  But sometimes I am surprised to see that the camera didn't see it the way I did.  And who's to say I'm wrong?  John Wesley Powell seemed to have gained much from his journey down the great unknown, and he didn't have a video camera.  Writing it down welcomes the looseness of imbelishment, and the opportunity for the spirit of the moment to overpower the drone of the moving picture metronome.

I think I might just bring my still camera on my next trip.  Or maybe nothing at all.  Maybe just use my eyes.  Afterall, the dynamic range of the eye blows the latest DSLR's out of the water.  And with my mushy grey ten terabyte SD dome, I should be able to put something interesting together.  I already quit facebook last week, why not go ahead and like Rainbow Jeremy, ditch my Telly, and keep retrograding into my true derivative self.