Author: austin

Winter Solstice

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December 21, 2016. It is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. There are only nine hours and forty six minutes from sunrise to sunset. Regardless of daylight or time of the year, it’s another opportunity to get out and enjoy life. An impromptu relay adventure began with bundled and layered cyclists leaving the U.S. National Whitewater Center at precisely 7:28am. The hustle and bustle of Uptown Charlotte’s workday commute quickly faded as the team ventured east. The country roads of rural Piedmont NC winded towards the tree-line confines of Uwharrie National Forrest. At a small boat launch at the intersection of NC Highway 109 and the Uwharrie River, an exchange of personnel, human powered craft occurred. The river was chilly and since the water level was low, the rocky sections required heightened attention in order to navigate the Standup Paddleboards.  Appreciating the moment required slowing down.  Both undisturbed and picturesque landscapes surrounded river bend after river bend. Crossing the Pee Dee River to Morrow Mountain State Park would lead to the third and final leg of our journey. Understanding that we were losing the race against the sun, the team reconvened and mapped out the fastest route to the summit of Morrow Mountain. Part road running, part trail running, and inclusive of an unexpected and steep final push, the team was greeted with an expansive and spectacular summit view at 5:13pm. Just 2 minutes shy of the day’s official sunset. What began as an idea to over-utilize the shortest day of the year, turned into a full day of dreaming about what other adventures lay beneath our noses, so close to home. – Adam Bratton is the Marketing Director at the U.S. National Whitewater Center.

Tree Teachings

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Tree Teachings

When I look back through my catalog of images, most of my favorites have one theme in common; they were shot from up in the trees. The vantage from within the trees is something that I almost always envision when I set out to a location. It helps frame the trails, actions, and landscapes in ways that we might not always get to experience, and often times reveals features that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. From climbing (and subsequently falling out of) pine trees as a youth, to years spent as a carpenter working with wood, trees have played a very central and formative role in nearly every aspect of my life. A lot can be learned from our forests and how they persevere through adversity, whether it be fire, snow, wind, or drought. The trees tend to be able to rebound, adapt, and cling on to life, even in the harshest of environments. They can grow on inhospitable rock faces, and even a few sustain life in desert environments. They tell the stories of the years hardship with the bows in their trunks, and crooks in their branches. They gift us with the ability to build shelter and to warm ourselves as they pass into their afterlife. When you take lumber and begin to work it into a home, or a piece of furniture, you become intimately familiar with the grain formed over the years of growth and adversity. It affects the blade as it cuts, binds the motor of the saw as wind loaded grain springs together after a cut. As the sandpaper cuts and wears down the rough and rugged exterior, beautiful patterns emerge in the grains that were hidden just out of sight. Of all the things I’ve learned from trees over the years, a few stand out as a mantra for living a healthy and fulfilled life. These are the teachings of the trees, and are the things that I have taken away from a life of admiring forests in all of their states of being. Stand tall, drink lots of water, enjoy the view, and remember your roots. – Tim Koerber can be found buying one-way plane tickets to countries he didn’t know existed the day before. For more of his work, check out http://www.timkoerber.com/.

Forbidden Fruit

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After decades of work, American Whitewater succeeded in opening access to Yosemite National Park for paddlers. The park hosts a number of rivers ranging from Class I floats to multi-day Class V+ epics, including the Merced River above Nevada Falls. On June 1st, 2015, South African professional paddler Steve Fisher took the first steps in paddlers’ collective dream to paddle this long forbidden fruit. With him was Pat Keller, the southeastern expedition and waterfall guru. Both paddlers have made careers out of charging into the hardest, most remote whitewater expeditions they can find and completing them with style and grace. I joined them with a film crew to document the trip. We approached the river from Tuolomne Pass, hiking 17 miles through alpine meadows, past icy cold lakes, and into the headwaters of the river. At the end of the first day, after hiking with a loaded boat on his back for nine miles up and over a 10,000 ft pass, Keller was still keen to explore. We scrambled up to a rocky point overlooking the Merced River valley, staring in awe at the massive snow covered peaks surrounding us. In the distance, I could just make out the trail the crew would be hiking the following day. I knew I needed a shot of that from this vantage point. The following day we completed our hike, arriving at camp thoroughly exhausted, but eager to see what the river had in store for us. An early start on day three got the team into the action right away. The Merced River is truly a gem with crystal clear water, massive slides, a handful of stout boulder gardens, and truly unbelievable scenery. With heavy rains on the afternoon of the second day, tension reached a pinnacle as we waited to see what the river would do. The window for approachable flows is quite narrow, even just a little more water than what we had could make the holes at the bottom of some of the bigger rapids absolutely monstrous, and too little water would easily result in a portage fest around boulder fields. The river actually continued to drop, leaving just enough water for Fisher and Keller to complete the epic first descent of this amazing river. All that was left was a seven mile hike to the valley floor around the nearly 600 foot Nevada Falls and the 300 + foot Vernal Falls. – Scott Martin is an internationally published photographer who studied at the Cape Town School of Photography. For more of his work, check out http://www.scottmartinimages.com/.  

Requisites of Life

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The view from 30,000 feet above the Grand Canyon belies simplicity. By the time you’ve sipped your gin & tonic, and punched out a perfunctory work email, your sleek winged aluminum tube has left that distant earth scar behind in a hazy contrail. But to go there and descend into this vast stone-strata-time-machine, carved for millennia, is to deeply connect to geology that is vast, complex, and confounding. The terrain is alive and every footfall a small act of faith, “Will this boulder roll and throw me, will this same hold I just barely pulled on now support my body weight, will the slick unroped edge fold me down into nothingness?” Danny and Doom, my compatriots on this seven day pack-rafting, canyoneering, peak bagging, rock climbing journey are like idle dogs who sleep until they can run amok. As the sun sets, we arrive at the canyon rim and soon we are hustling below, nipping at one another’s heels. A brief pelting rain produces an impossibly huge, iridescent, double rainbow, from Mile 150 to Mt Sinyella. We dub it the “insanebow”, and a very auspicious omen. We scan for faint trails, from man and beast, and it’s often a jumble of boulders- around, under, over, in this place it’s always up and down. We discover the clues for the way forward as they will be, just as crucially, the keys to the way back. “Where did we put the keys?” What drives one to voluntarily suffer, to be #pooronpurpose and board the elective shipwreck, the place of immediate rations and endless toil? Perhaps to rehearse “end times” is to prepare for them, in that if you choose hard now, you will know its knock when it naturally arrives. We go to the Canyon to reveal moments of transcendence, the sinuous narrows like silhouettes of hips and breast, a landscape that unravels me as I travel deeper into its intricacies, and mostly it’s to perform the requisites of life, that one breath, one sip, one bite amongst the rigors of wilderness- one step, one moment, one life, forever. – Timmy O’Neill is a professional rock climber, fun-hog and co-founder of Paradox Sports, a non-profit dedicated to providing inspiration, opportunities and adaptive equipment to the disabled community. You can follow his adventures at @timmyoneill.  Steve Fassbinder (A.K.A. “Doom”) is a rabid adventure storyteller and frequent contributor to Seek and Enjoy. For more of his work, check out The Republic of Doom.