The Dark Side

I was invited to play with a sea kayak yesterday, so I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Zihuatanejo Bay was pretty chopped up in the late afternoon, so I wasn’t about to attempt any photos while on the boat. But I did take a beach break and snapped a photo of the boat and some great clouds. Cover shot?

I headed up to Keystone today for my second day on the slopes this season.  For the most part the mountain is a man-made, icy, Strip of Death.  But it is fine to get the ski legs going, I’m going to make an attempt at getting some powder telemark turns in addition to snowboarding.  I brought the pocket G10 camera to grab a quick shot for the blog.  I was super lucky, just as I pulled up, 2 guys went huge off the big jump.  The shutter lag on the camera makes timing these action shots pretty tricky, but I got pretty lucky on this one!  I took 2 shots and was on my way.

Here I am on the ski lift at Copper Mountain for Opening Day 2009! I think this is my first Colorado opening day, as I’m not usually a fan of battling the crowds on the Ribbon of Death! But, my friend Doug from Elevation Outdoors scored us some tickets, so I thought it would be fun to get some early season runs in. My legs have a longer way to go to get in shape this year after basically no biking all summer. Anyway, I took some pics with the G10 point and shoot. Here they is, in full straight out of the camera pore showing glory. 

This post is an oldie, but a goodie, so I’m going to recycle it!  I haven’t been posting any mountain bike pictures because I don’t have time to ride any more, so let’s just reminisce about the good old days of unemployment!

Back when I bought my first camera (a Canon 20d), I pulled it out of the box and went straight to Moab for the annual Ellsworth Owners Retreat.  I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but I got a pretty cool sequence anyway.  Yeah, I should have used a faster shutter speed!  Any way, this drop is really nuts!  It is way bigger looking when you are there, because the rider has to bomb down another 30+ vertical feet of steep runout past what you can see here.

I hired a new employee.  His name is Steve. Steves are cool. I was explaining to him how RadioPoppers PXs work, and that I can shoot off-camera flash way over the camera’s synch speed using High Speed Sync.  To show my point, I took this shot of him at 1/8000 of a second.  Because I wanted to be sure that his backlit leg hairs were as sharp as possible. I took this shot with 2 Nikon SB-800s at full power, with a Nikon D700, Nikon 24-70 f/2.8, 1/8000, f/4, 640 ISO. How cool is that for a first day of work? Steves are cool.

.: Nikon D700, Nikon 24-70 f/2.8, 1/8000, f/4, 640 ISO :.

It has been a hectic July for me workwise.  Sad to say, I haven’t done a single ride! But I’m rectifying that this weekend by doing some rides up in Keystone. Here is a shot from the Colorado Trail high above Keystone.  I lugged the tilt shift along and had a great day taking some trail and nature photos.  More posts to come in the coming days.

Rob came to town for a week of riding and hanging out.  The week he chose to come to Boulder coincided with my busiest time of the year.  I didn’t take many photos.  Here are two.

On my final day in Steamboat, I headed southeast out of town past Stagecoach Reservoir to Kristi and Danny’s house. We shot an epic Sport The Dress™ session in the mountains near their home. After the shoot I headed back to Boulder the back way, over Gore Pass. On the way, I was hoping to find a trail suitable for mountain biking, without any real knowledge of the area or a map.

After a while of rallying down the desolate but well graded gravel road in the WRX, I came across a trailhead for an ATV trail. It was well packed down and looked like it would make for a solid mountain bike surface. So I headed up the trail and embarked on a solid 2 hour granny gear climb. It was pretty challenging with muddy areas, stream crossings, and roots, but I was able to ride almost the whole thing.

Once at the top, there was a great view at the top of this erosion slide gully thing. I have no idea what it’s called, but it was really deep! You can see the area where I started, at the far left, behind the pine tree, in the base of the valley.  It probably took me only 15 minutes to get down, but it was a ripping descent!

On my second day in Steamboat I headed a little farther out of town. Steamboat has had the same wet spring weather that we’ve had in the Front Range, so most of the high elevation trails were reported to be pretty swampy. I rode up the Hot Springs Trail to Lower Bear Trail and back down again.

I really enjoyed both trails.  They were not really all that difficult technically. Lower Bear is a granny gear climb, but nothing too severe.  During the entire ride up I was dreaming of video-ing the descent, inspired by my previous days adventure.  I rigged up a Manfrotto Superclamp to my stem and mounted my Canon G10 camera on top, with a plan to record the gorgeous descent.  I wasn’t really sure if the camera was going to survive or not.

Climbing up through the Aspens, the camera mount system seemed to be withstanding the vibrations. . .

I stopped at this overlook, turned on the camera, hit record, and descnded the trail at about 85% speed, trying to be as smooth as possible. About 1/3 of the way down I realized that the camera was rattling. The tripod mount was coming loose from the camera body! Bummer.  The video was really shaky with a nasty rattling sound. Too bad. It looks pretty cool, but also really amateurish at the same time. So I went back to the condo and promptly ordered a new helmet cam! Stay tuned for real videos coming in the future!

On my first day in Steamboat I did a local ride straight out of town.  The thunderstorms were threatening, and I needed to get a quick little ride in before the skies opened up.  So I headed to the base of Howelsen Hill, and started climbing the rod up to Emerald Mountain.  There is a pretty large network of trails up there.  I pretty much just wandered around, poking in and out of various tasty bits of singletrack.  I did find a map HERE, that gives one possibility of linking the trails together.   This is the view from The Quarry.

The singletrack in this area is super tasty, mostly buff and fast. The twisty parts in the aspen groves reminded me a lot of Park City riding. The timing was right for wildflowers too!

The trails were fast and flowy.  These pictures don’t do any justice to the experience.  It was here that I decided that I need to get a helmet cam to really capture the experience, I didn’t feel like I could show what the trail looks like with still photos . . . so look for videos to be showing up sooner or later.

I was riding solo this trip, which makes it a little tough to get the action shots. :>) So here are a couple landscapes that I took along the way.

OK, I’m long overdue updating this site. I’ve got some new employees that have been keeping me busy doing ‘real’ work. But I’m here in Steamboat taking more mountain biking photos, so I really have to get these old pics off the camera. 2 Sunday’s ago, Ryan and I rode the Ceran St. Vrain trail up to Miller’s rock. On the singletrack on the way out, there is an angled rock that is perfect for launching. Getting the timing right for action shots with the Canon G10 is tough, but sometimes you wind up with an interesting composition. In this case, it’s me with my head cut off.

The international climbing community was rocked this week when it was discovered that Boulder local Jonny Copp was killed in an avalanche while attempting a first ascent in the Himalayas of China. I knew Jonny through some other friends, and am saddened that the mountains have taken another friend of mine in the course of a year. Jonny was a professional climber, adventurer, photographer, and originator of the Adventure Film Festival. As a tribute the Boulder Theater put his name on the marquis on Sunday. You can follow all the updates, and the status of the grim search for his other two trip companions, Wade Johnson and Micah Dash, on the Adventure Films Blog HERE.

Greetings sports fans! While some of you might not follow all of the happenings over on Steve Z’s Light Side, here is a post that you don’t want to miss! Sport The Dress™ session up at Arapahoe Basin. Check out the full post HERE.

I’m always following the weather during the winter, tracking the big storms that yield glorious dumps of fluffy powder. I wasn’t able to get away too much this year, just too much business stuff combined with a pretty dry winter.  Well the storms finally showed up in late March and early April, and I was determined to get my money’s worth out of the pass.  So through the glory of Facebook, I found a co-pilot, 2 places to stay near Vail, and we set out for 3 days of bottomless powder hunting.

Things started out normally enough the first day at Vail. Until about 2 hours in the day I randomly shared a chairlift ride with a couple, and the girl had a piece of bridal veil material in her helmet. Turns out they were in town from Houston to get married at the swanky new Arabelle Resort in Lionshead. So we were chatting about weddings, and I mentioned that I have a shoot planned soon where I’m going to do portraits of the bride and groom in the dress and tux on skis. Tricia looks at me and says, “Can we do that on Sunday!?” Fortunately I had my camera gear with me, and I booked the shoot, thereby lengthening my trip another day. Well now I know that I need to get up skiing more often next year! And does this mean that I can write off my pass next year as a business expense?! Look for pics from that shoot soon on The Light Side.

Two runs later I went into the lodge to meet up with Io. She was talking with a man, who had a cute little girl pulling on his leg. Turns out he does energy-body work in Boulder. I asked him if he was interested in trading some family photos for body work . . . Yes! Two shoots hooked up in an hour! The next two days went pretty much as planned. I did a crazy amount of tree skiing. The next shot shows the aspen trees that lead down to the High Noon lift in the far Western back bowls. I’ve never skied them before because the slope is southwest-ish facing and is usually pretty bare. But after feet and feet of snow in two weeks, I was able to hit the chute just to the right of the lift, fresh tracks all the way. Very deep and steeper than it looks!

The second day at Beaver Creek was my best day there ever. We woke up that morning, and it dumped a foot of snow in 6 hours. It snowed crazy hard and I would have taken more pics but I was way too busy shredding. It was snowing too hard anyway. I hit tons of glades: Bachelor Gulch, Coyote Glade, Thresher Glade, Heads Up, 4 Get About It, Corkscrew, Stickline . . . my only regret is not hitting some of the steep upper glades earlier, by the time I got there they were closed. Next time I’ll know where to go first.

My last photo from this set is of a random guy who I shared a lift ride with. His beard was so awesomely coated with icicles that I had to take a portrait. Can you say, face shots?

So, I booked photo shoots, while skiing deep powder. I think it’s apparent that I need to manifest a place to live in Eagle County!

I finally was able to break away from the photo biz for a midweek powder day at Abasin. I wanted to make sure and punish myself for my lack of exercise routine this winter so I decided to telemark ski.  It was my first real tele day since February 1, 2007.  Yes, I’m already sore.

I dove straight into a Pali run right away. Here are some random guys enjoying some turns. The coverage was pretty thin, so the new snow is needed. It was a little crusty underneath but overall the skiing was good.

It was fairly windy on the ridges, but not nearly as bad as it was in Boulder the day before. The temperature was quite mild so it was quite bearable. Down in the trees and in the bowls it was quite nice.

After two laps on Pali I headed over to the Lenawee Lift. Insert more pictures of skiers gettin’ some.

Um, make your own comment.

I found a place to get arty.

So then I hiked up to the double-black terrain in Montezuma bowl that is skier’s right. There really is some cool, steep terrain here. Parts of it are steep enough that you can’t see what’s below you from the top. I need to learn the lines better from the lift so I can know where to go. The coverage is so thin that I played it safe and stuck to the places I could see. There is also a nice cornice for launching at the top.

It was quite windy at the top at times.

I ventured down around the edges of the bowl looking for powder stashes in the trees. Most of the hiking terrain on skiers right still isn’t open. They did open Crags, but there was nasty sun crust underneath the powder and the coverage was super sketchy. Then I made my way over to the Lightening Trees and . . . jackpot! Untracked backcountry-like conditions at midday. Its a bit of work to get there and get out, so it probably isn’t worth it. You should never go there or tell anyone about it! Check out how far my poles went into the snow. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Things have been busy around the office and I’ve been working hard on a lot of business stuff lately.  Software, computers, and website updates have kept me from shooting random things too often.  Well a couple beers at the Mountain Sun yesterday changed that attitude, so I took a couple shots of a broom ball game at the ice rink across from my office.  Just for fun.

I finally managed to get up into the mountains again!  It took a flatlander to do it, even!  Florida photographer Matt Radlinski was in town so we headed up to Keystone on Monday.  Matt is 1/2 of a husband and wife team that form the K-gallery.  They are planning on moving to Denver in early 2010, so you’ve got a year to step up your game before they take all your clients away.  I shot some pics so he can gloat to all of his Florida friends.