I’ve been a busy video editor these past couple of days, working on trimming various accumulated footage into a pitch video for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign, titled “Summit to Sea”, which will launch this Sunday. As I’ve mentioned, Lorie and I are planning on kayaking from my childhood home in Stevensville, MT, all the way to the Pacific Ocean this summer, so I’ve been trying to make a nice, motivational video to get off on the right foot for our fundraising campaign.

In terms of what we’ll be making during this endeavor, our plan is to follow the rivers to the sea, and make artwork along the way. For me, this will take the form of drawings and photography, as well as some writing. We’ll distill our efforts into a sort of travel-journal art book following the completion of our journey, which should be a thorough and engaging portrait of that particular route to the sea.

For years this project has only existed in my mind as one of those “you know, I’d really like to someday” kind of things, and at some point several years ago I told Lorie about it. It’s one of those projects that’s very tempting to put off, or do “later”, but Lorie has really encouraged me to make it a reality, especially now, when our schedules are still open from our residency travels. Now that we’re entering the “action phase” of the project, I’m getting pretty excited about it.

There’s a long way to go yet, of course. We’ve still got a lot of dollars to raise before we’ll be able to launch our boats to head for the ocean, but it’s definitely on its way to taking on a more tangible form than it did all those years ago when I was in high school, looking at the mountain snows from my window, wondering what sort of other places it passes through on its way to the sea.