My Year in Review - 2023

So, as this year comes to a close, I want to sit down and reflect for a moment. This year saw a lot of change for me, both personally, as well as professionally. Before I dive into some of the year, I want to give some insights into how I'm feeling now...

As I write this I'm currently sick with COVID and been dealing with an achilles injury that's prohibited for me from running since September. I haven't filmed anything for a client since October but that's actually been okay. I've fallen back in love with video editing, for reasons I'll get into throughout this reflection, and have still been signing the biggest contracts and licensing deals for past projects.

I think it's easy for me to feel like I didn't do enough this past year, mostly because I'm currently unable to do much physically with covid and an injury, but this year held a lot of exciting adventures.

So, without further ado, let's see what happened this year...

January:

After ringing in the new year in Valencia, Spain, I took a surf trip a little further south in Morocco. This was unarguably the most fit I've ever been in my life. We'd surf twice a day and I'd squeeze in a 1hr 30 min run in between the sessions. I was also coming straight off of my first ultramarathon and training for another race in Utah later in January so my body was a well oiled machine at that point. I went to Vegas a couple weeks after returning from Morocco to go film some rock climbing with my longtime friend and rock climbing YouTuber Noah Kane. I rolled my ankle in Vegas and ended up dropping my 50k down to a half-marathon that following weekend.

That half-marathon was also the first date with my girlfriend, Mallory, and while the date went well… the run itself was heinous. The race went about as bad as it could've been, stomach issues, pulled muscles, but the company was world-class. Somehow, she still liked me after that, we fell in love, adopted a dog together, and nearly a year later, are now living together just the two of us at our home in Boulder.

February:

I kicked off February with a video shoot for La Sportiva, capturing the community of ski mountaineering in Colorado, then headed to Costa Rica to create a film about a group of tree climbers in Monteverde that are teaching local kids about the forest. It was a wild adventure but so much fun to just hang outside in the jungle with new and old friends all day. I then returned to Colorado where I stepped in to edit a film for Reel Rock, a renowned rock climbing series that's created by Sender Films. I spent like a week huddled next to a space heater with Pete Mortimer, director of "Dawn Wall", "Valley Uprising", and "The Alpinist." In between all those work highlights I went skiing, hung with friends at the climbing gym and enjoyed the slightly slower pace of a winter in Boulder.

March:

My first "imposter syndrome" moment of my career happened at the Boulder International Film Festival where I got to present my film "Ignite Your Spirit" in front of a huge live audience. A couple days later, I was up at Eldora ski resort for the first day of filming for my documentary "Unseen Peaks" about a blind outdoor athlete who is using skiing, rock climbing and ice climbing as a way to find freedom in the outdoors. I also filmed ice climbing with her in March which was super rad and a pretty cool memory since we all just laughed and climbed all day. I took a quick trip to visit my niece in Washington and, while I was there, I was interviewed for the Backcountry Marketing Podcast where I talked about the power of storytelling. It was my first of two podcast episodes for the year - I recorded the second in December for the Bokeh Photography Podcast about how to build an adventure photo business.

April:

Shortly after returning from Washington I drove with my good friend Davide Giardini from Boulder to outside Aspen, Colorado to continue filming our How to Ski Tour series. We listened to Jack Johnson for four consecutive hours on that drive, it was awesome. That trip we scored some of the biggest powder days of my entire life, a totally legendary trip with photos that I'll be selling for the rest of my life for sure. I also did another project with Davide for KT Tape, this one about running and biking, not as much a ski shoot.

Then, I stepped in for a quick editing gig for an Alex Honnold film, doing the color and sound for a Reel Rock episode. This led to a last-minute invite from Pete Mortimer to go on a surf trip with him to Nicaragua so I spent the last 10 days of April surfing my brains out and nearly getting the biggest barrel of my life. Nearly is the key word but that thing was terrifying so I didn't get fully "pitted", just a fun memory. The guys were joking the barrel was so scary it had teeth and was chomping at me as I flew down the face of the wave.

May:

This month started off with an epic church event. I spent the year volunteering as the 4th and 5th grade sunday school teacher and it was consistenly one of the highlights of this year. We had a slumber party at the start of May with a glow stick dance party that rivaled the best of the college parties I went to. A week later, I jumped in to help on a big budget documentary for HBO with the production company that made Tiger King. Funnily enough, they're based out of Ojai, a place I would move a couple months later.

When I did this shoot I had no idea I'd be moving to Ojai but the universe had it's plans in motion already. I then flew to Senegal with the Goat Surf Club and met with some crazy cool environmentalist combatting plastic pollution. We also got placed under house arrest when the country dissolved into political turmoil as a dozen people died down the street from where we were staying. It was a bit scary but mostly we were just sad for the super joyful country we were loving to face such darkness.

June:

I ended up leaving Senegal a couple days early, partially because of the protests, but also with a side benefit of returning for vacation bible school or "kids camp" at my church. I was in charge of a lot of the crazy games where I got to spray hundreds of kids with shaving cream, sing songs and dance for a week. A perfect balance to the more intense exit from Senegal. My mom visited Boulder, as did my friend Ryan Kinder, where we had a live screening for our documentary "Keep Up" that was licensed by Outside TV for a lot more money that I thought we would've gotten for the project.

It was my first time properly licensing a documentary film to a network which was a cool feeling. I actually later saw it on TV when I was in a hotel in Aspen for work later in the fall which was a big moment too. I've directed/edited commercials that were shown on Hulu before but this was the first documentary I got to see in that capacity. In June I also skied my first colouir (a steep narrow chute on the side of a mountain) while filming for La Sportiva. It was a bit spooky but definitely a cool experience. At the end of June I flew to California to film the top male and female runner at the Western States 100 mile ultramarathon. It made me fall even more in love with trail running and the wild sport of ultra running.

July:

July began in Washington where I celebrated my mom's birthday with my entire family - my three sisters, their spouses, my neice and nephew. This was also the official start of my mustache era. I flew from Washington to Flagstaff, Arizona to direct and shoot a campaign for KT Tape with professional triathlete Mat McElory. After filming the last day of the Unseen Peaks documentary back in Colorado (the day after returning from Flagstaff), I packed up my car and drove to my new home in Ojai with my girlfriend.

We surfed, we biked, we trail ran, and I spent my work time editing the videos I shot previously. Then, I got a last minute request to create a film about a group of veterans going to Colorado to use nature as a form of recovery from their PTSD. So, before long, I was headed to the Great Sand Dunes national park to create this film which we later called "The Summit Within"

August:

*Here’s me surfing at my favorite beach one day before my concussion :)

After returning from the Sand Dunes I suffered a gnarly concussion while surfing in Ventura. I was unable to look at screens for over a week and had to wear sunglasses inside since my head was so sensitive to light. Halfway through August I took this concussion opportunity, where I couldn't edit any videos, to take Mallory to visit my hometown of Orcas Island where we hiked, swam, paddleboarded, hung with my childhood friends, saw some starfish and looked at some birds.

The rest of August was a lot of editing and fun weekend trips with Mal to go camping and surfing around California. We had this rad swimming hole like 5 minutes from our place in Ojai that we would go to hike our dog nearly everyday and it was awesome.

September:

On September 1st, Mal and I attended her best friends wedding near Rocky Mountain National Park back in Colorado. It was an amazing weekend and reminded us how much we love Colorado. Although living in California was pretty fun, Colorado definitely felt like home on this trip. My concussion was mostly healed at this point so I started running again, providing a nice outlet to long days behind the computer. However, I overtrained and developed achilles tendonitis which was originally misdiagnosed with "rest" as the way to recovery, when it should've been calf stretches.

Ryan Petry descending through the Aspen trees into Crested Butte after an epic mountain bike adventure

Needless to say, I couldn't run the rest of this year because of this injury. For work, by mid-September I finished "Unseen Peaks", "The Summit Within" and all the KT Tape edits. Soon after finishing all those edits, I flew to Colorado again to film my good friend and professional mountain biker Ryan Petry race an electric car on his e-bike. I had to mountain bike with him from Aspen to Crested Butte to film this and it was gnarly. I'm not much of a mountain biker so this really pushed my limits but I made it and the film is so much fun.

October:

After three months of living 15 minutes from Patagonia headquarters, I finally got called up to the big leages for my first two projects with them. I had a meeting on October 3rd next to their climbing wall in their conference room building about their spring campaign and, the next day, was flying to San Francisco to film a different project with them about professional climber Katie Lamb and how she sews her own clothes.

I also got to hang with my college best Beau who lives in San Fran so it was a fun trip on two different accounts. A couple weeks later was my 27th birthday where I biked 27 miles and surfed 27 waves to celebrate. October was a lot of making the most of California since we were moving away at the end of the month. We visited Santa Barbara a couple times, surfed with friends, went to the Channel Islands, revisted our favorite restaurants and hiked a lot.

Also got to photograph and hang with Ryan Kinder in LA again. Oh, and the Goat Surf Club in Senegal series was finally finished.

November:

This was a big travel month, but in the best way. Mal and I took big a road trip through Joshua Tree, Flagstaff and Taos to get our stuff back to Boulder. We then put things in a storage unit then flew to Europe where we spent another week traveling around France, spending some time with my sister in Rennes and a couple of day's bopping romantically around Paris.

After France, we flew to Edinburgh where one of my besties Ben Davies (from the Goat Surf Club) picked us up and we stayed at his place before attending Kendal Mountain Festival in England. This experience was insane. I spoke on some massive stages (like 500 people in the audience and my face on a jumbo tron) and got to present the tree climbing film from February, the blind climber film from the spring ("Unseen Peaks") and the veterans backpacking film from August (The Summit Within). A cool recap from my year came to fruition there in the UK. After returning from England, Mal and I moved into our new place to set up life in Boulder.

December:

In December I got to reconnect with all my favorite Boulder things. I met up with old friends, returned to volunteering with the 4th/5th graders at the church, and revisited all my favorite trails in town. After lots of discussions with a number of brands and networks, Goat Surf Club has found a home as we signed a contract with the Waterbear Network, my second film this year that was licensed to a network.

I also got on my YouTube channel game this month, hiring an editor to help take over the YouTube channel which I hope will be a fun side project in 2024. It's not much but I got 70 subscribers in the past two weeks which feels like a win. Very curious to see what 2024 will bring with that but, otherwise I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and hope it all works out.

Final Reflections:

So, clearly this year was an exciting one, but it also feels like an interesting transition is taking place in my life. I was once so jazzed on doing epic expeditions, traveling and shooting all sorts of amazing things but as I've gotten a bit older I'm trying to find a bit more balance in all this. Maybe when reading that recap it feels like a lot of travel still happened but it felt much more manageable this year than in the past. I chaged my business model where I act like more of a production company that provides creative direction, production, AND post-production rather than a dude that can only film.

This has opened up a lot of opportunities for bigger budgets and longer projects. So, when I'm not on location filming something, I'm still getting paid to put these projects together. Which means that I can be at home in Boulder spending time with my friends, my church, Mal and our dog. Mal has a great, healthy mindset when it comes to work/life balance and I feel like I'm learning a lot from her about how to balance it all. Although I've tied a lot of my identity and passions with what I do for work, I think it's important to sometimes turn that side of my brain off and focus on some of the other aspects of life that fill me up.

Looking towards 2024, I actually have no idea what it'll hold. I have zero paid projects lined up and no idea what's gonna happen for money but, if I've learned anything from this year, it's just to show up and keep doing my best... if I do that, good things will come.

Want to chat? Feel free to reach out :)