A Reason Why GoPros Suck

8/13

GoPros are great. In fact, you've probably seen a couple of shots of Jane wearing a GoPro on the windshield in this year's blog posts! I got one for Christmas this past year and have had a really good time filming some of the more beautiful drives that I've encountered on this trip.

However, there is one big drawback to GoPros: Jane doesn't like them, apparently.

Seems like every time I flip on the GoPro, something strange starts going on with the car. Never anything major, just a bit of a... tick, really. Maybe the power will fluctuate oddly, or idle will surge a bit, or she'll grump at me off of the line. Just little things to let me know she's grumpy. I don't know why, I just know that it happens.

The grumpiness culminated this morning as I was heading up Cape Royal Road towards the North Rim's greatest hikes and vistas. Though the road doesn't offer breathtaking Grand Canyon views, it is breathtaking in its own right, being wonderfully curvy and nearly overgrown with vibrant green bushes, vines, grasses, and trees. So I pulled off to the side, snapped the GoPro into its (very securely affixed) suction cup mount, and headed up the road while filming.

Well, I got about 5 minutes into the drive up to Cape Royal when I heard a loud banging as - you guessed it - the GoPro (and mount) departed the vehicle. On a blind curve. On a very narrow road. With no other turnout in sight.

I counted the number of turns, roughly, as I continued down the road to the next turnout. Then it was up to me to run back up the road, trying to avoid traffic, while looking for the damn thing. Since my phone was still connected to it via WiFi, I knew that it was facing upwards, in a sunny spot, looking up at a bush with rounded leaves. Ugh.

I spent about 30 minutes looking for the thing - during this time the battery ran out so I had no more WiFi to help triangulate its location - and ended up more than a little pissed off. I mean, how hard could it be to find a shiny plastic camera in grass? Very hard, it turns out.

Eventually I did find it, just as I was headed back down the road to Jane. Super happy about that, but not happy about the time I lost. So I decided that I should probably scrap the GoPro idea for the day and let Jane have this one. Can't fathom how the mount popped off (it's one that is commonly used by racers) but I did not want to mess with it anymore! I'd rather be out hiking anyways.

So I continued on to Point Imperial, which is the highest point overlooking the Grand Canyon at 8803 ft. elevation.

While there, I met a couple of fellows who were taking four weeks off of work and traveling around the western US checking out National Parks - just like me! We swapped ideas on places to go as they had visited some places that I haven't been yet, and vice versa. Always cool to meet other people like that on the road.

After my brief stop I got back onto Cape Royal Road and headed out to Cape Royal, which basically terminates a couple "prongs" of the canyon over from the North Rim Lodge/Visitor Center. With elevation, the roadside flora changed from dense overgrown bushes into a roomy forest full of pines (including Ponderosa Pines - my favorite trees)!

At the end point of Cape Royal Road, I lucked into finding a parking spot so I had a chance to do some quality hiking. I started with the Angels Window trail, which is short, paved, and accessible, and also spectacular!

People for scale

Checking out the river through the window

The short trails in the Cape Royal area also proved to be an amazing place to see the Great Unconformity, an angular unconformity where underlying rocks (740 million to 1.8 billion years old) were tilted upwards, eroded, and then overlain by much younger rocks (~525 million years old). It's famous because it's so abrupt and easy to see, but also represents a huge amount of missing time! If you were to put your finger across it, you would have the potential to be simultaneously touching a 1.8 billion-year-old rock and a 525 million-year-old rock. Pretty cool. But also it looks cool even if you don't care about the geology.

And, of course, the surrounding scenery is incredible as well!

I still had some time for the day after wandering all over the Cape Royal trails, so I headed back down the road to the Cape Final trail pullout. I parked Jane in the dusty dirt parking lot, where she looked surprisingly at home in the trees:

The Cape Final trail was very peaceful and just the right amount of effort, starting with a bit of a long uphill but opening up to amazing vistas pretty quickly and following the canyon rim from there on out. I found this scene just a few feet away from the parking lot, but something about the lighting just really impressed itself on me.

I had a bit of a hard time figuring out what was an official sanctioned trail, and what was just a popular off-trail track. Not a problem for navigation purposes, as it's impossible to get lost when you're adjacent to the nation's largest hole in the ground, but I do try to stay on-trail as much as possible to avoid destroying ecosystem. But - in one of the maybe-legit, maybe-not-legit trails, I did stumble upon this incredible view:

Hmm I spy an unconformity

I continued along the rim and kept coming out at increasingly more amazing views. Eventually, one was good enough that I had to sit down and eat lunch. It is wonderful to be able to pick a rock - any rock - right on the rim of the Grand Canyon, plop down, have lunch, and see not a single other soul the entire time. It was nothing but me, some hawks, and a lot of empty space.

The lunch rock and my shadow (does this count as a selfie, technically?)

I knew that someone was on the trail ahead of me - one other car was parked in the lot when I arrived - so I hung out at the base of the Cape Final lookout for a while. I figured probably they were also enjoying a nice lunch with the (assumed) knowledge that there were no other people around to bother them. I know well how jarring it can be to think that you're alone on a trail, only to round a corner and find that someone has been there ahead of you the whole time. So I took my time. Eventually I did see the hiker coming down, so I headed up to meet him and ascend to Cape Final.

To my surprise, I found a clearly-labeled camping spot near the top - just one - about 5 feet from the edge. I bet it's an amazing place to stay, but man I would be so scared of getting up in the middle of the night, forgetting where I was, and falling right off the side of the canyon. But I guess that's the risk you take when you go for one of the most remote canyon-edge campsites in the whole park!

At the very top, I was rewarded with full unhindered 180* views of the canyon, unmarred by fences or people or their things. It's the kind of place that makes you wonder what the world was like before it was "tamed". What would it have been like, to be the first person to climb up here and lay eyes on this part of the canyon? I guess I'll never know - and I guess I'm thankful anyways that the Park Service thought to place a trail going here, and maintain it for hikers to use.

With the Cape Final trail thoroughly explored, I headed out for the park exit. I stopped briefly at the Roosevelt Point Trail - which really isn't a trail - and saw, you guessed it, more of the Grand Canyon.

Towards the park entrance, I lucked into seeing the park's herd of bison hanging out! I thought it a bit strange that there would be bison here, so I asked a ranger and they informed me that the bison had been brought here many years ago as part of a breeding program, and that they had done so well that they just kind of stayed. Pretty cool.

Lots of babies!!

This guy is pretty dang cute

Bison always look dumb when they roll... always.

As I headed back up north to Kanab, UT, for the night, I took some time to think about the whole GoPro situation. Not just the "what the heck happened to make it fall off the car" thing, but really the whole concept of GoPros, to put it more philosophically. In many ways, video is very similar to photography to me. It captures a sense of motion that photos never could, but frequently falls short of the real thing. A video can't give you the precise cocktail of sounds that you might normally process as background sound - crickets, grasshoppers, birds, rustling trees, that kind of thing - and that's not the kind of thing that you would normally notice. But there is a subtle hollowness to video as a result when you can't hear them. And, of course, you can't smell the fresh vanilla pine scent of Ponderosas, or the crispness of the air, or the warm earthiness of sun-baked rocks. Nor can you (in a standard GoPro video, at least) really get a sense of the scale of the world around you. You just really can't substitute the real thing for a video.

So, in a way, I find videos to be a little off-putting. And it's easy to get caught up in the obsession to the point where you spend more time looking for places to video than you do looking for places to enjoy. I try hard to stay far away from that and make sure that if I turn on the GoPro, it's because I see something that I think is beautiful, not because I am specifically hunting for something that others will like. I get a bit trapped because on the one hand, I want to take a bunch of videos so other people can see what it's like to drive a vintage Mustang across the most beautiful parts of the country. I really do want others to experience that. But on the other hand, I would so much rather people experience the world for themselves, and I would much rather be experiencing it as well instead of messing with a camera. It's a fine line to walk for sure.

I hope to be able to post some videos in the future once I figure out what to do with them - 4K files are huge! But in the meantime... Kelly signing out.

P.S. - Apologies for the very late post, but I have been very caught up in getting back into my work, buying and sorting out a new house, starting a bunch of new projects, etc.! I will try to be faster about the next post.