HEAVEHOmovie.com — Official Blog

Rounding out the heavy hiking, sizing up more mysteries. . . .

ManagingEditor@HEAVEHOmovie.com — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 01:12:54 GMT

The month of August gave new meaning to “heavy metal,” with the photo and video acquisition shifting into overdrive to capture the dozens of weighty objects I kept finding off the trails and in areas where gravity took the lead. Man-made jewelry, as it were, seems to mock-lace certain sections of the Gorge. Sometimes the objects were crude, ordinary trash. Others held my fascination while I layered on the bug spray, sometimes taking hours to shoot all the setups I wanted to capture ideal illumination under the tree canopy. There’s something to be said about traveling lightly to find this stuff, though, which for me meant carrying a minimal amount of gear on my solo runs . . . pretty much what I could jam into a backpack and sling over a shoulder (I slipped and landed without any damage a total of maybe three times the entire summer). Yes, I vote for introducing mules to the Gorge, à la the Grand Canyon.

Mid-August’s solitude in the chunk of the Gorge I had been visiting managed to get ruffled pretty heavily one afternoon when I started to sniff a new smell down there. It was tough to tell what it was and whether it was emanating from across the river in Canada or else from far up at the top of the Gorge itself. I was close to water level when it made sense that the scent was from a fire, still faint but getting more acrid as I went up the usual path back to the surface. Just above the most precarious few yards of trail that are literally carved out of one of the steep shale slides, it was clear that the fire was spreading from a small spot . . . and getting on the fierce side. It was well on its way to blocking the only way out of that stretch of trail. I didn't have nearly enough water with me to douse it but did what I could. By the time I was all the way up, packed, and driving away, I saw the authorities speeding down to address it. I found out later that the person accused of setting it got caught . . . and left the smoking gun—er, Bic—for me to shoot the next day. [Insert disconcerted shudder here. . . .]

Since this is a documentary about the arcane—especially on an express route down to the Gorge carpet, as I like to call it—it may be best to keep holding off the reveal of exactly which major objects are down there. It’s only fair that the audience wait until the maximum effect can be seen in the finished product video, right? Well, rest assured, you are in store for a metric Gorgeload of oddities, spanning the entire realm of sensibility, plausibility and heft. All share something, though: they endure, there in the Gorge, as Nature does her best to phase them out on a custom timetable. You will get to see this process show up over and over within reels of footage and hundreds of still images I accumulated down there over the past two months. As production segues from the height (or depth) of this outdoor acquisition to grabbing live action interviews and other imagery from stock photos and films, expect to view nothing short of an outdoor museum of the 20th Century, discarded, with no curator whatsoever.

We welcome you to return for updates, and anyone with unheard stories to tell can drop us a line. Thank you for visiting the HEAVE HO blog.

A month of stand-out finds, connections and spent calories in the Niagara Gorge. . . .

ManagingEditor@HEAVEHOmovie.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 18:12:31 GMT

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.

HEAVE HO production kicks into gear. . . .

ManagingEditor@HEAVEHOmovie.com — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 03:34:01 GMT

Acquisition for the HEAVE HO documentary began today, on time, with an excursion along the Niagara River.