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The concept of our trip began as a simple idea. Plan a snowmachine trip that's longer and more adventurous than anything we have done before, and video the highs and lows along the way. This evolved into a 1856 mile trip crossing the state of Alaska, which spanned 32 days. During which we encountered temperatures above freezing and below -40, deep untouched snow, areas with no snow at all, thick brush and forests, dangerous glacier and river crossings, icy overflow, steep mountain passes, open water, and rock hard windblown plains stretching for miles. And that was only the beginning..
One of the goals of the original trip idea is to record video footage of the trip progress, the adventure, scenery, history, and highs and lows along the way. The idea is NOT to produce another "Alaska reality" show like many shown today, with exaggerated drama, clever editing, and out of context scenarios. Instead, we'd like to produce a high quality adventure series documentary of grand adventure in the last frontier. Inspired by adventure series films such as the Long Way Round, and by rich video footage like All.I.Can, The Grand Adventure promises to be an exciting venue. Our team will do our own filming, no hidden cameraman, just the group of us, usually miles from another human being. What we show will be real, not hyped up or acted out scenes. We will have enough challenges along the way, there is no need to invent additional ones.
One of the goals of the original trip idea is to record video footage of the trip progress, the adventure, scenery, history, and highs and lows along the way. The idea is NOT to produce another "Alaska reality" show like many shown today, with exaggerated drama, clever editing, and out of context scenarios. Instead, we'd like to produce a high quality adventure series documentary of grand adventure in the last frontier. Inspired by adventure series films such as the Long Way Round, and by rich video footage like All.I.Can, The Grand Adventure promises to be an exciting venue. Our team will do our own filming, no hidden cameraman, just the group of us, usually miles from another human being. What we show will be real, not hyped up or acted out scenes. We will have enough challenges along the way, there is no need to invent additional ones.
Along the way, we looked at and traveled some of the historical routes accessing the Interior and the North Slope of Alaska. We traveled through remote villages and visited with those that live there. In Northern Alaska, we passed thru herds of hundreds of caribou, visited ancient hunting and whaling sites, and visited an abandoned military RADAR outpost from the Cold War on the edge of the Beaufort Sea.
Moving forward, we are now sorting through the 125 hours of video and time-lapse footage obtained during the expedition. While we have an extensive amount of footage, and coverage obtained on the trail was generally very thorough, we are missing some footage necessary for the big picture of the documentary, such as life in camp and preparation details. Efforts are ongoing to produce a film series from this first expedition.
Meanwhile, plans are beginning to take shape for even greater adventures in the spring of 2016 and 2017. Some TGA team members are forming plans to participate in the Iron Dog snowmachine race in Alaska in the spring of 2017, and Cains Quest snowmachine race in Labrador in 2018. Even more exciting, for 2019 an expedition is being planned that is too big to talk about just yet, but it will cover several countries, 5000 miles, and take several months. Learning from our past experiences, this trip (as well as Cains Quest potentially) will include one to two professional dedicated cameramen to take documentary footage, and hopefully will be backed by a network such as National Geographic, Discovery, etc..