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A month of stand-out finds, connections and spent calories in the Niagara Gorge. . . .
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Location: Blogs HEAVEHOmovie.com — Official Blog |
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| Posted by: jpw |
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 2:12:31 PM |
In case you've never had a chance to hike the lower rapids trail, let me clue you in to the first reaction you might have at the gorge bottom: it’s daunting. You truly are at peril with everything from little nuisances like poison ivy to slightly more concerning factors like shaky footing over rock crops, the utter swiftness of the current (if you dipped into it for whatever reason) and the lethally steep shale slides along the cliff face. My scouting colleague and I gave a shot at crossing one—once—but decided that without ropes, it probably wasn’t the best idea to risk going directly into the drink. I've heard that some do make it across by jogging but I’ll say ‘no thanks.’ Also, this is the general area where rockslides supposedly did in the financially creaky Great Gorge Route in 1935. We weren’t interested in staging a new rockslide and turned back to toward the Whirlpool entrance, passing plenty of signs that gravity wasn’t on strike . . . of course, you'll have to wait until HEAVE HO premieres to see more.
 Getting to know people I had never met before the start of this project is a great perk. Thanks to a chance meeting at an event last month, I had the opportunity to speak at length with a new friend—Forrest “Fosh” Wendt—from the old Niagara Mohawk power company. Here’s a gentleman with no shortage of anecdotes from the collapse of the Schoellkopf power plant fifty years back, straight from his third month on the job as an electrician. It felt great to hear his personal reflections on the succession of hydropower schemes over the years, all the way up to the present at the Niagara Power Project. His generous loan of a pair of “manuals” (that weigh almost as much as the old plant) plus a lead on a few Kodak slides provided an unexpected but super fruitful step on the way to covering the stories from the southern end of the Gorge. Our conversation wrapped up with a walk to the plant’s old elevator shaft, now serving as a Gorge outlook point.
Even a production in HD will fall short when conveying the pure visual oddity of the Gorge. There is too much to absorb. I was there just about daily for the past month and it’s still tough to express how many photographic subjects beg to be first each day, not to mention the challenge in lining up the same weather conditions for even a few days in a row. A brief shower can change the characteristics of the terrain down there, from safe to slick, or make the task of matching consecutive footage almost impossible. There was no guarantee that the same artifacts—no matter how many decades they were down there—would show up the same through the camera’s viewfinder. Also, since most of the stretches I would visit were off limits to the public, the inanimate objects started feeling like private property to me, making it a hassle when something would turn up missing or relocated the next day. Expect to see all of these objects appear within the official release of HEAVE HO.
If you can contribute any new information on artifcats in the Gorge, please drop us a line. Thanks very much for your interest in HEAVE HO. |
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