At the top of Rock Cut I sat down on the ground against the building with the restrooms on the other side, out of the wind as much as anything up there is out of the wind, with my laptop open on my knees and a camera card in my hand. I was out of storage. I had ridden all that way to shoot, and I could not shoot anything until I emptied a card. So that is where I was on the highest continuous paved road in the country: on the pavement behind a restroom building, moving files.
That is what the trip was. Work. I went to the Rocky Mountains for photos and footage, and to see what the mountains handed me. The pass was the point of the route. Sitting on the ground behind a restroom building, in heavy wind, moving files so I could keep shooting, was the job showing its actual face.
Out of Space
The X6 had run out of room. The fix was supposed to be simple. The drone card had one flight on it, a sunset I shot the first day when I had spare time, so I pulled it. In hindsight I should not have had a card in the drone at all. The internal memory would have done the job. I put the card into the X6 and I could have sworn I felt it seat. I looked down to check and it was gone. Not in my hand, not on the ground, not anywhere. A guy stopped and helped me look for it. It went into the wind, and that sunset flight went with it.
That left the card in the Canon, which was supposed to be the backup. I pulled it and moved the photos to the laptop. Those came off clean. Nothing the Canon had already shot was lost. While I was working I set the main card down beside me. That card had the bull elk on it, the ride through the canyon, the morning climb up the mountain. Everything I had come out there for. The wind moved it from where I put it. For a second I thought I had lost two cards in ten minutes and that the second one was that one. I found it. I was flustered and freezing and there was nowhere safe to set anything down.
Then I reformatted the backup card and put it in the X6. That is where the day broke. It threw an error. I restarted it and it told me it was working. It did that over and over and I kept believing it, because it kept saying it was recording. It was not. Everything I shot from Rock Cut until I reached the hotel was gone. At the hotel it came up unreadable. I reformatted it again and it worked fine after that, which was its own kind of insult. Pulling that card cost me the Canon for the rest of the day too, since the Canon no longer had one.
Later I got talking with a guy shooting a Sony with a big lens on it. I told him what had happened, that my card had blown away and the replacement was junk and I had no way to keep shooting. He handed me a small 4GB card. No transaction. Just handed it over. I found that genuinely cool. It did not fix what was lost. It did not need to. A stranger saw the mess and put a card in my hand.
The Snow That Never Showed
I picked the route to go over a mountain pass for snow and cold-weather photographs. There was no snow. The single reason for that line on the map did not pay off. What the pass did deliver was cold, and wind that did not let up.
I was wearing a heated vest the whole way over. I never plugged it in. I had two battery packs on me for the cameras and a head full of filming logistics, and it did not occur to me that the vest could take power. It probably would have helped a lot. That is a dumb miss. The vest was on my body, unplugged, the entire cold ride.
The Ride Home
The pass was one day. The ride home was another. On the final day I got pulled over. My plate had come back as a van, so he came up on me thinking he might have a stolen bike. First thing out of his mouth was whether it was mine. I said it was. He stayed apprehensive until dispatch confirmed it, and then his tone changed completely. No ticket. The message was slow down.
Then the second-to-last gas stop. I always straighten the handlebars and hold the bike vertical when I fuel so the tank fills to the max. Moving the bar yanked the nozzle out of the filler. Gas sprayed over the bike and over me. The part that actually got me was that it kept spraying. I could not get the nozzle tab to release and shut it off. For a few seconds that was the whole world: fuel going everywhere and a tab that would not give.
Afterward it is the kind of thing you laugh at, and I do. In the moment it was not funny. The dry upside is that I now know gas on the tank did not damage the bike.
Glad to Be Home
The mountains were beautiful. I met a couple of good people. I also left a memory card and a laptop charger somewhere behind me on the road. It was a grind every single day. It was never a pleasure trip. It was a job from the start, and it behaved like one.
I am happy to be home. Whether anything deeper from the trip shows up is still open. I am not going to invent it so the story closes clean. Beautiful. Hard. Useful. Over. And I am glad to be in my own house.