On February 24, I decided to go out for a ride. It was a normal fall day, rainy, cold, but nothing out of the ordinary. But what I found on that ride would take me on a new adventure, and would totally change the environment around me.
I decided I would go ride the "Comeback". It's steep, fast, and makes you earn your descent with a good climb at the beginning. But as I turned onto the trail head, I saw a sign that stopped me in my tracks. It read "Warning! No access permitted between 7 AM and 5 PM. Road building in progress" I got a big lump in my stomach. I knew what this meant. Loggers were coming. I immediately forced my pedals down, racing up past the sign, ignoring the warnings, and my bikes cries of pain as I mercilessly drove the pedals around and around. I found warning tape across the trail, warning me to go no farther. I quickly ducked under it, and 50 feet later, I came upon utter destruction. What had once been a small, single track climb, surrounded by tall fir trees, was now a pile of stumps, smashed trees, loose sticks, and over turned dirt, covered in machine tracks. It made my heart hurt. I layed down my bike at the edge of the road to be and carefully stepped through the maze of stumps and sticks, and surveyed the damage. Gone was the dark, tight, singletrack, surrounded by trees at least five times my age. Now there was nothing, but a graveyard - where beauty once stood was now a wreck. It made my heart sink, not for the trees that had been destroyed, but for the many more that would be taken and the trails that would be lost. But then my creative juices started flowing. "Why not show this to the world?" I thought? "Expose everyday people to what riders experience." Rushing back to my bike, I rushed home, grabbed my camera, and returned to the site of the damage. My mind was coming up with new ideas, new angles, new words, a story to tell. I spent the next few nights brainstorming, writing, and editing. Over time, I gathered footage, interviews, time-lapses, and edited it all into my final product: Slashes. I never could have guessed how much work this 15-minute short film would take, but it is finally ready. So sit back, turn up the volume, hit full screen, and watch my creation in HD. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did making it.
