Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Still A Great Day | Adventure Lifetyle Junkie


Photographing kiteskiing can be a bit of a challange. When the wind and conditions are good you can get some amazing stuff. But when conditions are bad, everything can go bad fast.

Last night I took Ross Nimmo and Ray Schmidt out to Spray Lakes for one last shoot. This time I had hoped to shoot at dusk and get some dramatic light to go with some commercial looking action shots. We arrived on the lake just after a small squal had come through and while launching it looked promising. The key word here is promising...

But like the bi-polar misfit that Spray is, we were handed a second storm instead. Ray and I had made it across to the huge dome of ice on the west side when we both got slammed but 20 km plus gusts. I tried to park my kite but had to release the primary safety in order to get it down. In minutes I was packing the kite up so I wouldn't lose it when Ray walked up and over to my position, without his kite. I asked him if he managed to park his when he reached down to his waist, started to swing the chunk of bar and yelling, "it's gone"!

Ray had apparently released his primary safety as well but his kite never fully depowered, dragging him about 30 meters across the crusty snow before the barddesintergrated. His kite was gone, for real. With no way to stay anchored to Ray, the kite would be somewhere down wind along the length of the lake.

I managed to reset my kite, relaunch, and tow Ray back to the original launch point on the East side of the lake. Once there, Ross and I decided to ride a down-wind cruiser to sweep for the now lost kite and meet Ray somewhere on the North end. Ross found the kite and we met up with Ray but by this time we were done and the wind would still not cooperate with us. We were done.

Sometimes I spend a lot of time and money to get out to produce some images and once in a while things go bad. Sometimes I come back with nothing. Actually I can't say nothing, each time I am in the mountains it's not really bad. Even when things go bad, gear gets wrecked, and I get no great shots, I am still in the mountains. As long as no one gets hurt, a bad day in the mountains is still a great day.