TOP Blog

Hard not to hurry home

Wed, 27 May 2009 09:27:36 -0500

There was frost on the tent this morning. Through the night I didn’t feel the cold in my sleeping bag. But this morning after the walk from camp to the coffee shop, my fingers are numb. As I write this the yellow tips of the ring and middle of both hands bounce with a tingle on each keystroke.
Ironically I slept better last night than I have in several days. After five nights in the rarified surrounds of the Mountain Lodge at Telluride the campsite at edge of town was a welcome relief. Aside from being substantially less expensive, it gave me a chance to quite my mind from the exciting ideas racing through my head, each jockeying to be foremost in my thoughts. It’s taking every once of will power I have not to jump in my car and drive the 1,300 miles back to Madison and get started developing all the stories I discovered at Mountain Film. It’s hard not to hurry home.
An email from the news director at Wisconsin Public radio yesterday almost cut this Joy Trip short. He wants a story I pitched to him a few weeks ago for broadcast on Monday. It’s about a cool philanthropic program to distribute $20,000 for the benefit of others $10 at a time. Summit Credit Union, a banking institution with 20 locations across southern Wisconsin, gave individuals who came into their branch offices a $10 bill to donate to charity or further any cause they believe in. The program is called Pay It Forward. The only catch is they have to record a 3-minute video explaining what they plan to do with the money.
Starting on June 1st people can vote to determine which video is the best on Summit’s website. The winner gets $500 in cash and $500 to be donated to the non-profit organization of their choice. This story will run in my “Good Works” column in the June issue of the Capital Region Business Journal (www.madison.com/crbj).
I’m always thrilled to get Public Radio air-time. But to be home and produce this story by Monday would mean three days of break-neck driving only to be fully spent when I arrived. Fortunately the news director is giving me another week to get the story to him. So I’ll be able to continue this trip and take my time getting home. I won’t have to hurry.

On this Joy Trip I discovered that a lot of the anxiety of I’ve been feeling lately is the result of the fast pace I seem to keep. You might know what I mean. I’ve been revving my engines to the red line only to be brunt-out and worthless. So I’m going to take my time and get the jobs ahead done in a thoughtful and productive manner. If I’ve learned anything at Mountain Film it’s that art, adventure and philanthropy take time to be done well.

In the coming weeks I hope to share with you some of the amazing stories presented over Memorial Day weekend in Telluride. I’ll continue my series on Ken Burn’s new documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” with an interview with still photographer Quang-Tuan Luong. He captured many of the breathtaking images that appear in the film. I’ll also introduce you to Dr. Rick Hodes, star of the film “Making The Crooked Straight.” Dr. Hodes provides care for thousands of children and adults in Ethiopia suffering from tuberculosis of the spine. Providing medication and surgery he’s changing many, many lives.
And I managed to record two concerts performed by Tuvan throat singer Kongar-ol Ondar. He appears in the film “Genghis Blues,” which tells the wonderful story of blind bluesman Paul Pena and his journey to Tuva. There, east meats west as Pena shares his own unique style of the Tuvan singing style.

That’s only the beginning. I’ve collected many other stories to share with you soon. Mountain Film at Telluride 2009 represents a turning point for The Joy Trip Project. As I’ve search for a purpose and identity for this web site, podcast, photostream and soon-to-come blog, I’ve decided that these stories of selfless expression of art and culture for the benefit of those less fortunate will be the primary focus. Future editions will include shorter versions of the podcast called “Tripettes.“ These will feature reviews and short clips (audio or video) of new films in current distribution. So I hope you’ll continue to pick of the feed.

Thanks for your continuing support. Please tell your friends about The Joy Trip Project. And don’t forget. Your contributions make contributions of this media possible. You can make donation to this and future productions through a fund set up by the Outdoor Foundation. Visit them online at www.outdoorfoundation.org and make a pledge. Just let them know it’s for The Joy Trip Project.
Now walk away from your computer, get outside and enjoy the day!

Mountain Film Photos

Sun, 24 May 2009 07:46:07 -0500

Mountain Film is not just about movies. This symposium of art and culture is a gathering of people engaged in conversation on the pressing issues of our time. Each morning begins with several panel discussions on weighty topics that range from climate change to world wide food shortages and the depletion of soil in the developing world.
With so much to take in, it’s impossible to enjoy everything Mountain Film has to offer. But here you’ll find a few photographs showing some of the days events.
Click here to view Day 2>>
Click here to view Day 3>>
Click here to view Day 4>>

Interviews 50 Cents

Sat, 23 May 2009 08:12:53 -0500

What I love most about Mountain Film is you never know who will be here. Alex Chadwick is the co-creator of National Geographic Radio Expeditions on NPR. His work in documentary audio is what inspired much of my own career in storytelling and the creation of The Joy Trip Project. I hope to talk to Alex in the coming days about his film “Interviews 50 Cents.”

Mountain Film takes on food security

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:04:08 -0500

The iPhone was set to vibrate. But an incoming text message still woke me up from a sound sleep at 5:14 AM. The screen read: verdepr: Burn’s new documentary is literally turn-key messaging for environmental preservation!
Smiling to myself I clicked off the display and cast my hotel room back into utter darkness. Padding to the bath I sloshed cold water on my face to wash away the crumbs of a night’s sleep. Mountain Film in Telluride starts today.
The Mountain Film Festival had actually started for me two days earlier. I made my way driving cross-country from my home in Madison, WI. I stopped over night the day before in North Platte Nebraska about half way. A flashing road sign pulled me off the highway with the promise of a room for $35. I’d been driving for almost 12 hours and as the sun began to set in the west. It was time pull over. The price was right.
The little motel is what we used to call a down-n-outter. Back when I was a traveling salesman I often felt a bit short on my luck. I plied my trade over 35,000 miles a year hoping at every turn of the wheel to earn enough cash to keep the family afloat and put food on the table. But these motor lodges aren’t just cheap, but offer something you can’t always get from better-appointed accommodations: downstairs access to an outdoor entrance, down and out. You can pull right up to door and not have to climb flights of stairs carrying arm-loads of luggage and heavy sample bags. Sometimes you can just ask for the Willie Lowman suite.
My career as a salesman was put to death almost six years ago. As a journalist now I write about the people and places that inspire our innate sense of adventure. Mountain Film in Telluride is a symposium of art and culture that showcases the accomplishments and ambitions of individuals and institutions around the world. Focused this year on the topic food, Mountain Film welcomes a number of experts and presenters who address the pressing issues of our times as we seek to discover how to feed the world’s growing population.
“Food is a very popular topic now,” said Mountain Film director David Holbrooke. “Every trip to the grocery store is a trip down my conscience.” In his opening comments to the Moving Mountains symposium, Holbrooke asked a packed audience to search for solutions to the moral dilemma of our food supply. He observed for the audience that we past the point of answering the simple question “What’s for dinner?” We now are compelled ask instead, “Where does our food come from?” And “How were the plants and animals we eat prepared from the time they are planted or penned to moment they go into our mouths to fill our bellies.
“You have to wonder,” said master chef and master of ceremonies Ming Tsai. “How many outbreaks have we seen lately? Spinach, peanuts… is our food safe? Are we loosing control in this country?”
Environmental writer Bill Mckibben, author of “Deep Economy” offered an expanded view of the worlds’ food supply with a glaring indictment of technology that once boosted crop production. He said wide scale farming with synthetic fertilizers, while increasing yields, has apparently resulted in a depletion of our ability to produce food in quantities sufficient to feed the world’s people.
“Soil has become a matrix that keeps plants up right so we can pour oil over them,” McKibben said with dark humor. He suggests that the earth has become so depleted of nutrients that plants require more and more human intervention in order to sustain them. And that begs the question: “How sustainable is our current system of agriculture?”
Even though this might seem like a less than exciting topic, food security falls well into the prevue of Mountain Film in Telluride. Over the next several days scientist and explorers will take the attendees to the most remote corners of the world through their films and stories that reveal the adventure in feeding the hungry. The program also promises to delve into issues of childhood obesity, the so-called Slow Food Movement and methods of agriculture that not only feed indigenous populations but help to create a healthy environment.

Between Nebraska and Iowa

Thu, 21 May 2009 06:42:56 -0500

Have you have ever had one of those moments when all you can say is, “Oh shit!” It’s usually right around the time you feel yourself fully committed to the cause only to realize that something may go terribly, terribly wrong.
For me I had just ticked over 750 miles of the Joy Trip, Wisconsin to Colorado on my way to the Telluride Mountain Film festival. After 11 hours of drive time the sun was finally dipping down into the west. I’d been squinting through the windshield as I made my way in that same direction adding years to my complexion with hard lines scoring the corners of my eyes.
Well out of Iowa and almost half through Nebraska I pulled over at a rest stop to check my email and phone my wife. Cell connections were solid throughout the trip so far. So with my iPhone mounted to the dash I was already well up to speed with the events of the day. This stop was more for the potty and the option of sending messages if need be with two free hands.
There was one message in particular I was waiting for. And it had as yet not come. I wrote to the Festival’s executive director early that morning to make sure that I do indeed have a media pass waiting for me when I arrive. More than half way to Telluride, somewhere between Iowa and Nebraska, I was fully committed, my ass hanging out in the breeze of passing cars on Interstate 80.
My “Oh Shit!” moment happened that morning as I was packing. I was gathering up all my office materials into a box for 10 or more days of field reporting. It was then that I saw my press badge from last year’s Mountain Film. It was a palm-sized laminated card with my picture grinning back at me. The folks in the PR department arranged to have it sent to me in the mail. Didn’t they? It was only then that it occurred to me, “Oh shit! I don’t have one of these for this year!”
More than 12 months ago I was producing a series of podcasts for an outdoor industry trade magazine. I was an affiliated journalist with the credibility of an established institution behind me. It didn’t matter then, just as now, that I had no assignment to cover Mountain Film. I just thought it would be a good idea for me to be there and do what I could to write and produce as many stories as I could.
From last year I reproduced five stories that profiled the work of that number of presenters at the event. They’re currently posted on The Joy Trip Project podcast page. And though I have no idea where the stories I hope to produce in the days to come will land, but I am steadfastly committed to the cause of sharing stories of adventure that improves the human condition.
So media badge or not. I’m going. With or without preferential access I’ll be there to cover the event and bring back stories for you to enjoy. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Flash the badge

Wed, 20 May 2009 05:52:58 -0500

Everyone needs a symbol. This notion perhaps comes out of 20 years of emersion in the sales and marketing business, but there really is something to having a single iconic image that sums up in a glance your system of beliefs and your identity to the world.
The Joy Trip Project logo was created with the help of one my dearest friends Melanie Schmidt, a brand development professional you works to promote nonprofit organizations. Her company The Timpano Group helped me to solidify the incoherent ideas racing through my head. I had hoped to somehow create a small organization to tell stories around topics of outdoor recreation, environmental conservation and practices of sustainable living. Melanie worked with me to bring my ideas down to earth into a clear and identifiable vision of the business I aspired to create. And when she presented me with the JTP logo everything that I had hoped to accomplish had suddenly become real.
Yesterday Melanie handed me a small bag of JTP logo pins to share with everyone I encounter in my future travels. These tiny badges are the symbol of my mission to tell the stories of people who are devoting their lives to the preservation of wild and scenic places and having a lot of fun in the process. If ever you see a flash of this badge you’ll know the Joy Trip Project continues.
So now the storytelling begins in earnest. I’m hitting the road today on the first full-fledged Joy Trip. I’m packing my bags and loading the car to head west. As I have many times, I’m driving across the plains and the prairies to the Rocky Mountains. The destination is Telluride Colorado.
Through Memorial Day weekend I’ll be attending the Telluride Mountain Film Festival. The plan is to bring back a series of stories on the event as well as a number of interviews with the filmmakers. This year the symposium of adventure art and culture is focused the world-wide food shortage. In the days to come I’ll post comments and photographs to this blog site. I hope you’ll follow my progress. Please post your comments and share your stories as well.

An essay contributed by listener Amy Miller

Fri, 1 May 2009 15:05:54 -0500

Over the last several weeks people have been asking me “So what’s the Joy Trip Project all about?” My standard answer had been, “Well, it’s what I do to stay busy between paid reporting gigs.” I suppose to some degree that’s true. I’m running this podcast as non-profit, a labor of love to develop my talents as a storyteller and hopefully share with you some memorably experiences of interesting people.
But with each episode as the production quality slowly improves and the stories become a bit more compelling I seem to be building fan base. And for that I’m very grateful. Notes from listeners express their appreciation for what they’ve heard and some have shared stories of their own.
So with my thanks this week I am pleased to share with you a contribution from a listener in Boulder, Colorado. On a recent trip there I had the pleasure to sit down with a trail runner and aspiring essayist. Still in her 30’s she’s crafted a plan to carry her through the next sixty years of her life. Here’s Amy Miller and her essay, “How I want to grow old.”

Reconnecting Linc

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:06:30 -0500

The plan was to sleep in the airport. It was 10:30 on a Friday night and the BART train dropped me at SFO exactly one hour from Lincoln’s front door. We’d spent four days tripping together, Linc and I, in his Subaru between San Francisco and Yosemite. No way I was going have him drive me at God-awful early to make a 6AM flight. And the budget for this project didn’t include a hotel stay, not for five hours of fitful sleep in sheets without sympathy. I’d just as soon cozy-up in a corner of the concourse, shut my eyes and snore for passing strangers.
But as luck would have it I made it to the gate just in time to catch a red-eye flight to Minneapolis connecting to Madison. I slept instead across two time zones next to a woman who struggled all the while to get comfortable. Gray-haired and be-spectacled, she finally assumed a posture bent over the extended tray-table, her head in a pillow and folded arms. Reclining my seat I snoozed peacefully preferring this to a hotel, comforted in the progress of forward movement. I was heading home, but the joy trip continues.
I’m working up a series of stories in the run up to the new PBS documentary film “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” by Ken Burns. Back in January I spoke to the filmmaker who let me know about the recurring themes of racial diversity and the role people of color have played in our nation’s heritage of wilderness protection and environmental conservation (visit The Joy Trip Project). As one of a handful of African-Americans who make their living in outdoor recreation this is a topic that is naturally important to me. So paying my travel expenses out of pocket to follow the promotion of this film is something I am glad to do.
Over the last few days I’ve been attending several events related to the film series and reconnecting with my friend climber, cinematographer and National Park Service Ranger Lincoln Else. I met Linc back in 2005 in Yosemite Valley while I was producing a story for American Public Media’s radio program Marketplace (visit Undies get a new life). Funny thing is he and I hadn’t spoken to one another in almost 4 years but we’ve become reacquainted over Facebook. But it wasn’t until I had committed to this trip and bought a plane ticket that I learned that he was planning all the same travel plans. Turns out Linc’s one of Ken Burns’ favorite film shooters.
Linc shot a lot of the majestic scenes of natural wonder in several of the National Parks featured in the film, especially Yosemite. Based in San Francisco he travels back and forth to Yosemite for either of his jobs as a cameraman or a park ranger. Good work if you can get it. He also shoots for National Geographic.
Any way, with Linc as a traveling companion and my own reporter’s cred as journalist-on-assignment we joined up with the Ken Burns’ media entourage. In the days that followed we chowed on junk food in truck stops and dined on fine china between schmooze-ops over cocktails mixing with power brokers of both Public Broadcasting and the National Park Service.

An interview with Jennifer Lowe-Anker 2

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:35:38 -0500

Jennifer Lowe-Anker was in love with professional climber Alex Lowe. Each with a passion for the outdoors and the wild scenic places of the world, they built a life together of adventure and travel. But with separate careers, Jenny as fine artist, there were many times when the two were apart for long stretches of time while Alex explored and set new routes on mountains far away. And even with three children at home Jenny realized that part of loving Alex was having to be without him.

In 1999 Alex was killed in an avalanche while exploring the Tibetan Himalaya. A freak accident on the 26,000-foot peak Shishapangma also took the life of filmmaker David Bridges. But Alex’s best friend and climbing partner Conrad Anker, who was also on that expedition, was spared. Though Jenny mourned the passing of her husband she took great comfort in the support of his friend Conrad. Through their shared grief Jenny and Conrad discovered affection for one another and then fell in love. They married and Conrad became the adoptive father of Alex’s sons Max, Sam and Issac.
In a memoir entitled Forget Me Not, Jennifer Lowe-Anker reveals the intimate details of her life having tragically lost one climber to fall in love all over again with another