Got back to Lander last week after spending most of the summer doing two NOLS courses in Alaska! The first was a 30 day hiking course in the Eastern Alaska Range (my first as an instructor). The second was a 21 day sea kayaking course on Prince William Sound full of Naval Academy Midshipmen (a training block for them) which I tagged along on exclusively to shoot video. I put up a Flickr album of each course, video content to follow in the not-too-distant future, enjoy!
Just got back from a 34 day training course to become an instructor with the NOLS. Here are some photos from the training which took place in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico and Cochise Stronghold in Arizona. First order of business as a new instructor is teaching a hiking course in Alaska!
Brian and I spent three weeks in Arizona shooting for NOLS at both Cochise Stronghold and the Santa Teresa mountains. Here are some stills from the trip. Stay tuned for upcoming releases on http://www.nols.tv to see the footage we shot.
May, June, and July have been some of the best months I can remember having lived, seriously. It started with a two week trip to Bolivia with Jason, Emily, Forrest & Dad where we visited several major cities and saw much of the Bolivian landscape. Then came a 30 day NOLS course focusing on mountaineering in the North Cascades and rock climbing in Squamish. These spectacular outings were topped off by coming back to Lander for an awesome few weeks of climbing with friends. Check out a video I made about the Annual Climber’s Festival that took place in Lander a couple weeks ago.
I’ve also been getting more excited about Flickr and have posted images from the NOLS course as well as the most recent climbing trip. Bolivia photos coming soon!
I started working for NOLS last march as a video intern. Over the past few months my coworker, Brian, and I have enjoyed working for NOLS so much that we decided to try and create full-time positions for ourselves. As of last thursday we are full-time employees!! We created two ‘Video Producer’ positions and we have a one year contract to prove to NOLS that they should continue supporting a video department. Initial signs look good as video was a big topic of discussion during our annual ‘State of the School’ gathering which took place this last weekend and includes the NOLS board of trustees and all the various branch managers. If you haven’t seen them yet, some of our videos are at www.nols.tv which will be overhauled in the coming months. Unfortunately most of our latest work is not publicly viewable yet because we’re working on developing several series of videos before we release them. We’re also working on creating a stronger presence in the youtube community which fits into the NOLS word-of-mouth style marketing.
First day as happy (and well dressed) employees. Brian took the wonderful image at the top of this post while the two of us were in Telluride for Mountainfilm. I did the photo-shopping.
Had a couple exciting weekends in the mountains recently.
WEEKEND ONE:
This was my first view of the heart of the Wind River Mountain Range.
Why was I in a helicopter you ask? I was asked to help out with a search and rescue mission for a climber stuck on Pingora peak in the Cirque of the Towers.
So I got my gear together, put on a bright yellow shirt and a flight suit, and jumped into the chopper with my climbing partner Graham.
Flying in you can see Pingora on the right.
Graham looking cool in front of the helicopter at the landing zone.
Here’s where it starts to get interesting. Joe Kelsey (author of ‘Climbing and Hiking in the Wind River Mountains’ 2nd ed.) was the injured climber’s partner. Here he is (in red) explaining to the search and rescuers what’s going on. (Pingora is the prominent peak in the background)
Turns out the injured woman (pink shirt & white helmet) was Kelsey Dayton a reporter from Jackson who was climbing with the aforementioned Joe Kelsey so as to write an article on him. I’ll let her finish up the story, read her article on the whole incident here.
Suffice to say we got her out safely and flew out just as the sun was setting on the glorious granite of the Cirque.
WEEKEND TWO:
My second weekend in the winds was to go after a bit of a lofty goal: summit Gannet Peak with Graham (Wyoming’s highest @ 13,804) in two days rather than the 3-5 days most people say is necessary (oh yeah… it’s a 25 mile approach).
Still in high spirits after the first five miles or so.
Lot’s of interesting stream crossings.
We ran into Andy Bassett in the middle of his NOLS instructor course. He was on day 28 or so in the backcountry and was definitely excited to see us.
Summiting sunday morning… cloudy.
Summit success! Just ice axes, no crampons. Half way done. GREAT VIEWS…
The weather finally clears as we’re leaving camp on the way out. There’s Gannet!! (upper right)
There she is again.
Hobbling out with hiking sticks. My knees felt like they were gonna explode at about 40 miles in, ugh.
This is pretty much all we saw for the last couple hours as we hobbled back to the trail head in the dark. We finished our food, ran out of water a few miles back, and kept yelling “you go away bears” every now and then to keep our sanity. We finished car to car in just over 40 hours and were crippled most of the next week. Hmmmmm, maybe I’ll just stick to sports climbing.
Filed under: Photo
This old man asked me to take his photo, I obliged.
Then he asked to take my photo. He gave me his hat and once again I obliged.
Filed under: Photo
Haven’t put anything new up in a couple weeks… but that’s because I’ve been busy! I’m finishing up three video projects this week. One for NOLS; an introduction to a series of videos being made on Leadership. One for the local orchestra; they played a great concert last month which I got paid to capture and am just putting on the final touches. And one for fun; a single-day-shoot we did last sunday to make a short for a local contest. I should have all this stuff up soon.
In the meantime check out these great portraits Brian (fellow video intern) and I took of each other this morning! We’ve been toying around with the light kit a lot these past couple weeks to get some clean interview footage but it transfers well to stills too.
These will DEFINITELY be going on our official NOLS id cards.
Filed under: Photo
It’s only part of the natural progression to blog about one’s cat, no?
This is Mittens.
Kyle Duba 
