Drive In - Hike Out

Three days ago, January 24, I set out to film my project for the Video Storytelling Intermediate course. It's about my friend from work who fur traps. I scheduled the whole day to shoot and he drove me as far as he could into the mountains in his Ford Ranger. It had just snowed the previouse night, so there was four inches of fresh snow on about two inches of ice. We snowshoed in about a mile to where his trap line was in the canyon, then back; a total distance of around 3 miles. It was an AWSOME day of shooting and I got some great footage, as you'll see in the video. I was dead tired by the time we finally made it to his truck only to quickly find out that we didn't have chains and soon got stuck. What's worse, the more we tried to power off the side of the hill, the farther down we would slide into the canyon as we broke traction. Did I mention that only 50 yards away was a 40 foot cliff? I'm sure I did. We stopped, ate the two granola bars we brought and snowshoed out a couple of miles until we got cell phone service. Lucky for us, he had a Cousin in the area who came to our rescue on his 4-wheeler, pulling his young son and daughter behind him on padded sleds with a third in his lap! The adventure wasn't over yed. Shane and I, with my tripods and camera gear, side-saddled the back rack on the 4-wheeler for a mile or so, simultaneously holding on for our lives while turning back every so offten and tipping an ear to see or hear if one of the kiddies bounced off their sled into a snow bank. We did finally make it home. I had my footage, but my buddy ended up going back later that night with family to retrieve the Ranger. With that, I hope you enjoy this video, 'An American Heritage', to be posted shortly....