Into the Banff Mountain Film Festival!

I used my camera and a GoPro to take footage while hiking the Thelon Esker, and now you can watch a 15-minute video of my hike as part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival! The High Road is available as part of a virtual group of films titled "Out the Back Door." You can subscribe for $15 and watch them as part of the festival anytime between Oct 30th and November 7th. Here's a link: https://www.banffcentre.ca/film-fest/virtual/out-back-door

It is wonderful to have the film be part of this festival and I'm happy to be able to share the footage and story with the Banff Festival audience.

I had only a tiny 5-watt solar panel and one spare battery for the GoPro, and the solar panel had to charge all my devices including the GoPro, a camera, a GPS, a headlamp, an InReach, and my phone which I used for voice recognition messaging and which also served as a backup camera and GPS. Luckily, there's generally a lot of sunshine in the NWT! At first I thought I could charge all my devices by putting out the panel every time I was stopped, and that was sufficient during the early days of never-ending sunshine and heat. But that weather ended and I eventually had to hang the panel from my backpack to have enough charging during a day. I managed to acquire somewhere around 7 hours of footage during my hike.

While being alone for 40 days, photography and filming certainly occupied a significant portion of my time. In addition to the footage, I took somewhere around 4,000 photos of the esker, most of which I waypointed and passed along to two esker researchers from Carleton University: Grayson Bilak and Don Cummings. I tracked my entire hike on GPS to be able to plot my path later and to accurately waypoint all the photos.

I'd like to send a huge thank you to Keith Robertson for editing my footage and creating such a wonderful film. Thanks also to Ryan McCord and the Back Bay Scratchers for providing music for the film, to Esther Gadd for sound design, and to Sasha Stanojevic for the map animation. Hope you can catch and enjoy the film!