The Summit to Sea project has now been fundraising for just over a week, and we’ve made good progress. As of this morning, we’re 6% of the way toward our goal. With about 34 days remaining before our February 29th deadline, we’ve clearly got a lot to go yet! Let me give a big “thank you!” to all of you who have already chosen to help back this project, and to those of you who have been spreading the word around. It’s really helped! And if you haven’t backed the project yet, well, you can always choose to do so, and help us cover the remaining ground before the end of February!
The trip won’t simply be a float down the river, of course. As we’ve mentioned in several places, our intent is to produce an artistic record not just of our travels, but of the entire region we’ll be passing through. Through writing, sketching, and photographs (and probably more than a few audio/video recordings!) we’ll be making a comprehensive portrait of the people, places, and things we encounter along the way.
This might sound familiar if you’re familiar with another expedition to the Pacific Ocean that happened a little while ago. The Lewis & Clark expedition made a journal of their travels too, which wasn’t merely an account of coordinates, landmarks and rations. In addition, the journals are filled with drawings of the birds, plants, and animals the expedition encountered along the way, as well as accounts of the people they met. Will our sketchbook/journal be as remembered in two hundred years as the Lewis & Clark expedition’s documentary efforts? I suppose we’ll find out in two hundred years!
If you’d like something of a “sneak peak” of what we expect the journal to look like, one of the rewards we’re preparing for our backers is a zine that will be something of a “chapter zero” or introduction to the journal. The zine will be smaller (each page will be half-letter sized) than our envisioned final publication following the trip, and will be in black and white, rather than color, but it will hopefully convey the sort of work that we’re hoping to produce– although the smaller format might make its contents a little more abbreviated! We’re focusing on trying to cram a little more artwork in there than words, but I think we’ll come out with something that really evokes the spirit of what we’ll be making when we conclude our journey.
In the meantime, I’d better get started on my daily training regimen to prepare for the trip: cardio on the treadmill, and sketching in the journal!