Skip's Wild Life: The adventures of a wildlife filmmaker

Since my July adventure with Mike Fay in the redwoods, I had been longing to be out amongst those giant trees again.

Biologist and expert tree-rigger Jim Spickler eases the camera back out of the canopy

There is just something magical about those ancient forests that had a lock on my ever wandering mind. So you can imagine my excitement when John Rubin Productions once again phoned me to work on the redwoods show they are producing for National Geographic Explorer. This time around I’d be assisting my good friend Andy Shillabeer on a shoot focused on the work of some dedicated canopy researchers.

Given that the Coastal Redwood is the tallest tree on the planet, you can imagine that working in the canopy isn’t exactly easy. The lowest branches of a redwood might not appear until they are over a hundred feet in the air, so how do they study them?

They climb.

Steve Sillett climbs to the top of a newly discovered redwood giant in order to measure its full height.

Steve Sillett and his fellow researchers might be the most physically fit botanists in the world, and it has paid off. Their love for climbing and science has opened up a whole new understanding of an ecosystem that had for a long time literally remained out of reach of science. The immense size of redwoods coupled with the fact that they can live for millenia, means all types of organic matter are deposited high up on the branches, and eventually there is enough soil that plants and all kinds of other organisms spend their entire lives up in the canopy, just as though it was a piece of the forest floor. Anyway, I could geek out talking about this stuff forever, but I’ll leave some of that for the show. Afterall, the only thing more exciting for someone like me, is the question of how do you film this?

Luckily, they were way ahead of me on this. Andy had done the redwoods portion of the Planet Earth series, putting to use a system known as a cable dolly that enables you to balance a camera while sending it flying along ropes, producing breathtaking cinematic moves. Since then he’s built his own cable dolly with some improvements on the system the BBC has been using. Putting the new system to work for the first time meant a lot of long, hard days as we ironed out the kinks. As you can imagine, getting all that gear out into some really rugged parts of the forest was not easy, but the results were absolutely breathtaking. Being able to move the camera hundreds of feet vertically, diagonally or horizontally gave our shots the feel of a helicopter flying right through the forest. Andy would control the pan & tilt of the camera wirelessly, while I controlled the focus, zoom and iris. Then by stablizing the system, we were able to get locked off shots, even conduct interviews 300 feet in the air. Like I said, breathtaking. The only downside… having to wait to see the show in all of is high def glory until it airs in October 2009.

If your interested in learning more about the cable dolly system, check out their site www.spider-cine.com. If you are more psyched about the trees than camera rigs, pick up the NY Times bestseller, The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. Its an incredible modern day exploration story, that chronicles the work of Sillett and others in their quest to discover and measure the tallest tree on earth.

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For an upcoming National Geographic Explorer program, one element of the story involved following famed researcher, conservationist and explorer Mike Fay, as he and a fellow researcher trekked across the Redwoods. Their transect of the entire range of the redwoods would take over a year, covering thousands of miles of rugged terrain on foot, all the while living out in the forest. To adequately capture the true nature of Fay’s experience, the producers of the program needed someone with some camera talent and outdoor savviness that could operate independently, carrying all their gear and provisions in order to spend some ‘real’ time with Fay on the trail. Basically, they needed someone young, dumb and poor enough to actually be excited about spending 10 days bushwhacking through some of the more rugged bits of the Redwood forests of Northern California.

They called me.

Old growth Redwood Forest

My excitement about being asked to shoot, coupled with the thrill that any nature lover would get about being paid to spend time trekking off trail in the redwoods, very quickly outweighed any rational thoughts about how difficult this would be.

I would be carrying about 65 lbs of gear on my back, and a camera in my hand while trying not only to keep up with Fay and his partner Lindsay, whom had been hiking for 10 straight months at this point as they explored the redwoods. I also had only about 16 hours turn around between returning to Texas from the mayfly shoot in Wisconsin before I was to jump on a plane to Arcata, California. My packing and preparations were rushed, and I don’t think I realized how hard this would be until the first time I lifted my loaded pack. I hadn’t done this sort of serious backpacking in years. My thoughts raced. Was I going to be able to keep up with my subjects, or would I crumble under the weight of my own pack?

As the producer drove me up to the rendevous point with Fay, my fears quietly stewed in the back of my mind the whole drive up the coast. However, when I finally embarked on the trail, there was a spring back in my step. This would be an amazing adventure.

The pace Fay set was not at all gruelling. The goal of their project is to make an overall assesment about the health and future of the Redwoods. This meant taking a lot of notes and photos as they surveyed the hills and streams of everything from pristine old growth to clearcut timerblands. The frequent stops not only enabled me to keep up, but provided lots of opportunities for the camera and I to soak up Fay’s wisdom about the forest. There couldn’t be better way to learn about that ecosystem and forestry practices than to spend time out in the wild with a pair of researchers who have been living and breathing the subject for 10 months. It was a dream come true for someone as curious about the world as myself.

That isn’t to say it was easy. It was probably one of the most mentally and physically demanding tasks of my lifetime. On the first day I got seperated during a ‘quick’ hike up a ridge without our packs. They had GPS. I didn’t. I’m experienced enough as a hiker that I was never really concerned for my own personal safety, but I definitely had a lot of panicked thoughts about how if I couldn’t find them, and had to find my own way out of the forest, the shoot would be ruined. Even worse, without my cell phone (in my pack) I would have had to call my mom for help as I don’t remember many phone numbers in this age of technology. However, I did all the right things, found my way to a stream, followed it and eventually came across Lindsay, who also hadn’t seen Mike in the 3 hours since I’d been seperated. Her GPS led us back to our packs, and eventually Mike. I like to think I gained a little respenct from the two them for not having freaked out during the ordeal.

The rest of the week was challenging, but rather uneventful. At times the understory of the second growth forest would become so thick that we would literally have to crawl on hands and knees (remember we were also carrying a lot of weight), sometimes for a half hour or more at a time. Was I not in constant awe and wonder about the forest around me, it probably would have been a pretty grumpy hike for me.

The second to last day, after a fitful night’s sleep, I awoke feeling seriously ill. The week of pushing beyond my body’s limits had taken its toll on my immune system and I was running a high fever. Luckily that day we’d been planning on touring a new annex of Del Norte State Park with one of the parks officials, and seeing the condition I was in, he let me crash on the floor in a ranger’s station. At home a week later, I was still running a fever, but I wouldn’t have traded this experice for anything.

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PS check out this show about another of Fay’s past projects on Hulu.com