January, 2015 | Overland Adventures and Off-Road

Take an idea, flip it on it’s ear and tell a story. After all we have to do something with the hundreds of hours of off-road adventure video we have in vault.

For us telling a story with video is harder than it looks. We’ve had a You Tube and Vimeo LGRT channel for six plus years and put out 90 some videos. In our own opinion our off-road adventure videos seem to lack entertainment value. But there is hope.

“The Grocery Getty” was two years in the making. Watching tutorials, reading scripts, taking notes and considering how to apply their story telling lessons.

For a long time I thought a better camera, better technique or better software would help. Unfortunately no amount of “better” could make up for the lack of a story. And while The Grocery Getty is only 36 seconds (not including all the credits and disclaimers) it has a beginning, middle and end along with tension and a twist.

It’s not going to win any awards but it gives us hope that we can start to break the mold and tell better off-road adventure stories.

Shortly following a rain storm, somewhere east of Le Grande, Oregon.

Back in July 2012, I (Other Paul) took a ten-day off-road adventure through the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route (UTBDR) with my friend Paul (LGRT) and (then) new friend Brad. (Paul and Brad had gone to college together and yet somehow remained friends. This is perhaps more surprising given that the two had shared a vehicle the previous year retracing the route of a recent Baja 1000. Another of their collegiate friends, it turns out, is married to a woman who, at the time of the UTBDR off-road adventure, was my manager at work, which made for some interesting conversations in the office — and on the trail. But I digress. Paul and Brad later rejoined forces in 2013 for the 25th-annual TLCA Rubithon on California’s famed Rubicon Trail. Against many odds — or perhaps because of them — they remain friends.)

Paul was driving his well-equipped, smurf-blue FJ Cruiser (a.k.a. the Blue Bunny), with Brad doing his herculean best as navigator to keep Paul on route. (By ‘well-equipped’ I mean that in addition to the usual camping, recovery and field repair kit, Paul’s rig was stuffed to the gills with video, photo and computer gear, leaving Brad the space nearly the size of a small shaving kit in which to stow his things.) For myself, I spent the better part of two weeks sucking FJ Cruiser dust in an old 1995 Rover Defender 90, with an occasional intermission courtesy of the rain or sleet or hail that found its way under the 90’s surrey top.

The trip itself is extensively chronicled through the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route off-road adventure. One of my assignments on the off-road adventure was determining where to make camp each night. This was a job at which I fared poorly. Fortunately, there was plenty of dispersed camping along the nearly 900-mile route, which we ran “backwards”, north to south, departing from Bear Lake at the Idaho/Utah border. I had set another goal for myself, however: to make friends with a new camera, the wonderful (and sometimes maddening) fixed-lens Fuji x100. Some of the results of those halting first efforts appear below. No doubt I would do many things differently now, but shooting with the x100 isn’t one of them. And although I’ve recently sold it, the x100 (now in its third iteration) is perhaps my favorite digital camera.

The promise of good weather to come.

My route to Bear Lake to meetup with Paul and Brad went through Preston, ID, in which the film Napolean Dynamite was both set and filmed. Preston is home to the Cuttin Curral (Napolean: “I already get my hair cut at the Cuttin Curral”) and the Pop’n Pins Lanes.

Fueling up in Bear Lake. Somehow distracted, I left the fill cap to the D90 on top of a pump, which I didn’t discover until after we finished the first leg. Fortunately, the Rover part for the NAS 90 is a rebranded Stant cap, which made replacement a snap.