You have to hand it to rock climbers for making slacklining kind of cool. Before they started doing it during rest days at camp, tightrope walking was the wheelhouse of magicians and trapeze artists. A group of friends took 36 days to setup 14 slacklines and make this film. They also have a website selling their DVD.
via Wend
On Monday dozens of hikers were stranded in the Los Padres National Forest when a surprise rainstorm swelled creeks to levels too high to cross. An entire Sierra Club outing plus several more hikers required rescue. In all, 35 stranded hikers were rescued from the backcountry on just one day of the flooding. Additionally, two Boy Scout troops had to be airlifted from the same national forest after becoming stranded. As the storms keep raging, more and more require rescue: four from a creek bed, three on a cliff who tried a new route to get around the swollen creek. It’s getting crazy out there. At some point rescuers are going to have to stop trying to save them and just drop food and tell them to setup a camp city and wait for the creeks to go down. It’ll be like a Southern California version of Lord of the Flies.
The speeder scenes on the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi were shot in the redwood forests. They had a guy with a steady-cam walk through the forest filming, and then they played it back at high speed to make it seem as though they were flying. I kept waiting to see some stormtroopers scream past on their speeders during this video.
A Fish and Game Warden in California received at tip on four people illegally hunting in Yosemite beginning an epic, 6-day tracking effort that ended with the group of hunters walking out of the woods uncharged. A very detailed set of tips led the warden to make one easy arrest, and based on the accuracy of that tip, he assumed the other tip about the hunters deeper in Yosemite was also true. Several days later he spotted them, but the group also saw the ranger stalking them so they hid the deer carcasses they’d shot with bows and arrows. The group was caught sneaking out of the park but couldn’t be charged for lack of evidence. More rangers conducted a survey of area where the poachers hunted, and dogs found the carcasses days later. The group was finally charged and fined upwards of $60,000 plus hunting bans, probation, and possible jail time.
In something out of a bad episode of CSI, or rather any episode of CSI, some lunatic in California rolled a dead black bear out of their vehicle in front of a busy strip mall near San Francisco. The dead 300lb bear had been shot in the shoulder, and authorities are puzzled about, well, everything. The white pickup truck dropped the bear in San Leandro (headquarters of North Face) before peeling out. That must have been one crazy bachelor party. Someone check TNF cell phone records in the area around the time the body was dumped - nice, this is like CSI.
