Surprise! I'm climbing a mountain. Little Horn Peak (13,143 feet), to be exact, near the town of Westcliffe where I lived this past spring and summer. There's no trail up here. Just tundra and boulders and a bunch of dumb clouds. About ten minutes ago I almost lost my footing on an icy slope, which would have meant sliding downhill a couple hundred feet at high speed and probably fucking up some really important body parts. If you're reading this, mom, the reports of my near-death experience are greatly exaggerated.
I took the future award-winning photograph below from the summit of Little Horn. The prominent mountain to the right is Horn Peak (13,450 feet). It's called Horn Peak because, from down in the town where the people who decide what to call mountains live, it looks like a horn. As long as you're willing to accept the paradox that horns do not always look like horns.
From Little Horn we scrambled north across the ridgeline to Venable Peak (13,334 feet), tagging Fluted Peak (13,554 feet), Comanche Peak (13,277 feet), and Spring Mountain (13,244 feet) along the way. This is the view from the saddle below Venable, looking west across the San Luis Valley. All that yellow down there is aspen leaves losing their battle with death.
Here's the view south from the top of Spring Mountain at the ridgeline we've followed thus far. If you know where to look, you can see some of the peaks featured in this post from a few days ago; namely, Challenger, Kit Carson, Adams, and the Crestones just barely jutting up in the back there. Humboldt Peak (14,068 feet) is the thing you see as far back and left as you can go.
My family got me a GoPro Hero 11 Black Mini for my birthday this year.
I'd been meaning to buy an action camera for a long time, because I wanted to start bringing some decent footage back from my excursions into the mountains, and I also wanted to venture into the mysterious domain of video editing.
However, in the interest of living up to my unblemished reputation as a world-class procrastinator, I never made the purchase, choosing instead to be content with talking about how much I wanted an action camera, doing extensive research into the pros and cons of all the leading action camera brands, and asking a variety of friends which action cameras they would recommend and why.
(Yes, I do in fact have enough actual friends to warrant the use of the word "variety" here.)
But now, it seems, I have no real excuse to put off experimenting with video content.
Furthermore, since this GoPro was a gift and obtaining it required no action on my part, my renown for procrastinating is still fully intact.
What a wonderful feeling. It's almost as if I've just survived unscathed a near-miss lightning strike which in turn triggered a massive avalanche that obliterated a large party of social media influencers hiking up the valley floor and also tore open the entrance to a long-forgotten mining shaft thick with veins of gold. Oh how blessed am I among men.
Behold:
Now, despite my aforementioned in-depth research, I still really have no idea how to use this thing, and not the faintest clue about how to edit video footage. I can surely educate myself on the former matter once I've unboxed the camera and consulted the instruction manual that I hope awaits me inside.
(Don't worry, I won't be making an unboxing video, and come to think of it, let's go ahead and add all the people who make trite unboxing videos to that crowd of social media influencers I fed to an avalanche a few paragraphs back. Don't even get me started on reaction videos, either.)
Regarding the latter point, though, I'm open to any suggestions about software or techniques I should get up to speed with. Please don't hesitate to indulge me in the comments section.
Also, I'm not sure where to upload videos for use on Hive.
I see a lot of people using YouTube embeds, but I'd prefer to avoid adding anything of value to the Googleverse. I've tried 3speak a few times, but at the moment it appears to be broken, as the attempt to connect my Hive account to their platform eventually leads me to a screen with a little blue Next button that does nothing upon clicking. I heard a lot of people are migrating over to Rumble, so I might look into that site, too.
Anyway, in closing, here's an unlisted YouTube embed of a short grainy iPhone video I shot that shows my buddy hiking up the final pitch to Venable's summit. I think that even a clip as brief as this one captures the size and scale of these mountains a little bit better than photographs do by themselves.
For what it's worth, the video below contains absolutely zero unboxing nonsense, no cheap reactionary content whatsoever, and, sadly enough, not a single social media influencer getting picked up by a wall of snow thundering down at eighty miles per hour and then smashed to pieces in a boulder field at the bottom.
It can only get better from here.
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11-24-23. Oh how blessed am I among men.