Some disposable camera images from Berlin 2022
Every year my brother and I make plans for Christmas together that normally involve a trip to somewhere in South or Central America. With our family living overseas, it’s often just us drinking beers on a beach or hiking volcanos. The only semblance of tradition is our yearly viewing of “Elf.” This year, we decided on Guatemala, and to mix it up a bit, we decided we’d do a bike trip. We settled on a route around Lake Atitlán that fit our tight schedules. Quinn had tracked down a local bike shop with some bikes before we arrived, but we weren’t 100% sure if the owner had two bikes available. I joked I could just ride on the handlebars like we used to when we rode our bikes to the mailbox growing up. At the shop, we met the owner Edston and looked at the first bike. It was probably 30 years old, about my size, with shifters on the down tube, and a nice soft saddle. Edston, pulled out the second bike and explained that it was his personal bike. We hesitated a bit, surprised at how willing he was to lend it to us. Slightly bigger and just as old, Quinn stepped over it and it seemed to be a decent fit. After we road them around the cobbled streets in front of the shop testing out the brakes and shifting through a few of the gears we shrugged and smiled at each other, having already made a bond with our bikes. We negotiated with Edston a bit and landed on a deposit amount and a deal to return the bikes, unharmed, in five days. After picking up some tools, spare tubes, and thanking Edston, we took off back to our apartment to pack. We had a friend coming with a truck the next day to pick us up and drive us out of the city to Godinez where we’d start our trip.
Click below to see the full write up at The Radavist.
Normally, around Thanksgiving rock climbers migrate to the warm deserts of Moab to seek out the last bit of climbing for the season. It’s a trip I’ve done countless times so this year when my friend Akio and his partner Anju AKA akioanju told me they had a few clients lined up for a trip to Geyikbayiri and that they’d be doing some personal climbing at the tail end of the trip I wanted in. By the time November came a slew of familiar faces had booked tickets for a Thanksgiving rock climbing trip to Turkey so I finally booked my ticket.
Geyikbayiri is an amazing destination. It’s a climbers paradise - limestone cliffs surround a small valley about an hour away from Antalya and thousands of climbs await. While we were there, the first signs of fall started to set in and the valley’s green began to turn yellow; a sight I hope to catch in full swing the next time I’m back. Most days we woke up had breakfast, enjoyed Turkish coffee and walked beautiful approaches that took you through pomegranate groves, crystal blue swimming holes, and the occasional goat herd to the days crag.
Anju deciphering a beautiful and heady tufa. Beautiful climbing on incredible rock.
I’ve waited a long time for a trip like this. Although I love climbing it gets repetitive for me. I visit the same crags each season and often hear the same conversations about the same climbs over and over. My climbing experience has always been trumped by photographing the experience. The rush of on-sighting a route is overshadowed by capturing a new image. The connection to the movements of a climb is eclipsed by connection to the history of the people first establishing climbs and so on and so forth. But, travel has always allowed me to quest into the unknown in the hopes of seeing how I interact in the world. Connecting with new people and figuring out new norms in a foreign country push me in a way that other things do not. In Turkey I finally found myself reengaged with climbing and reconnecting with a country I had not visited in over a decade so of course, it’s one of the best Thanksgiving climbing trips I’ve been on in a long time.
When Denver photographer Seth Langbauer traveled to Mongolia’s eastern steppe in 2017, he was fascinated by the local hunting dogs known as taiga dogs. He first encountered the muscular canines, traditionally used by livestock herders, when he saw a demonstration at one of the region’s many horse festivals. “It’s basically a winterized greyhound,” says Langbauer 27.” They’re quite burly, but still lean and very fast.” Working as a team the dogs will chase down and kill foxes, rabbits, and even wolves. Over harvesting has long been a problem in the region, but Langbauer says that many of the families he met hunted to survive. The photographer spent more than two weeks traveling throughout the eastern steppe, braving minus-30-degree temperatures to capture the dogs in action.
Yellowstone Forever + Oboz Shoes
Just as I moved to Colorado, Bozeman based shoe company Oboz reached out to me to see if I was available to shoot their new boot made in partnership with Yellowstone Forever. As it happened I was going to be in Bozeman during the time they wanted to shoot and had a few locations in mind that fit the idea perfectly. I had two shoot days to create images that looked and felt like a back packing trip through Yellowstone National Park and got to have some great fun doing it.
