Thursday, September 15, 2011

Bugaboos

 I must confess that I have yet to visit the Bugaboos. This climbing Mecca in the Southern Selkirks of interior BC is a climber's paradise despite its reputation for rather bad weather. The traverse from the Bugs to Roger's pass being the Canadian equivalent to the Haute Route. The Fall Patagonia catalog has an image by my old Edge climbing gym workmate Rich Wheater on its cover which I've attempted to paint tonight. rich is a great photographer whose career I've been following since the mid 90's when I met i him in Vancouver, glad to see his work in such a prominent place.

I'll give this scene it a couple more tries as its a great image with beautiful lighting lots of nice rock textures, shadows, snow, scree, glaciers, all the things I love about the mountain environment that use to motivate me to try and map it accurately.


In the same catalog are some great Fred Beckey photos and a plug for a podcast by founder Yvon Chouinard (one of my climbing heroes) on his alpine  apprenticeship with Beckey. Also a great photo of the Vermilion cliffs from the Horseshoe bend on the Colorado near Page, one of my current mapping project (more on that in a forthcoming post). It's an amazing photo by Mike Reyfman that is as good as anything we'll be running in our pages. It's noticeable that Patagonia keeps putting out such great catalogs that keep inspiring me both to paint and to explore. Noticeable in that Black Diamond stopped last year to do so and that if it ain't facebook or twitter its considered useless. I guess the cynical in me thinks that the younger crowd more likely to be using the new media can't yet afford to buy too much at Patagonia, whereas the moneyed folks who can are still looking at print catalogs delivered to their doorsteps.

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