Day 40 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Local Adventures
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Day 40 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Local Adventures

Byrichard

For this 40th blog post on the topic of self-isolation, I’d like to speak about local adventures. I feel the need to do this because I see people posting about their trips to someone two to three hours from live and work during a pandemic and I strongly believe that getting into a car to have an adventure far from home at this time is short-sighted and selfish.


Between running, cycling and hiking I have got to know more and more of the local routes. I have found that there are a lot of nice places to walk off of agricultural roads where you can avoid everyone. Today I was walking in the woods by a motorway and I found what I call the “corkscrew tree”.


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Today during my hike I ranged further than usual. I went beyond my usual deflection and return point and kept on going and the reward for this was to see scenes and landscapes that I associate with thru-hiking imagery. i’m not thru-hiking. I am going around in circles and exploring every last trail and path, whether in the forests, along agricultural roads or the walkable space between fields. In some cases this includes fallow fields.


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We don’t need to drive for hours to see nice landscapes and to feel that we are visiting a new place. We just need to look around and see a path we haven’t been down, and proceed along it. The landscape above could easily be taken by a thru-hiker, but it’s in Switzerland, just minutes from villages and towns.


The pandemic is an opportunity to go back to the child-like habit of exploring every nook and cranny. By doing so we protect the environment by not using a car or public transport to get anywhere, and we get to find plenty of local gems.


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While driving to and from Geneva I often pass by this field and see these cows. Today my walking route took me by the cows and they were close enough for me to take a picture or three. This is local, and yet it feels like I’m travelling to Scotland or the US.



One of my habits, when living in London or visiting big cities is to walk for hours, until I get exhausted, and to return by public transport. I’m applying the same habit to explore the local countryside. I had already explored plenty of the local roads before, but because of the pandemic, I am being encouraged to explore ever more meticulously. By the end of the pandemic, I could write a guidebook about hyperlocal walks.


Aside from coming across cows with very long horns being suckled by calves in a field bordering with France and a corkscrew tree on a trail in the woods I also saw what I think are baby or juvenile apples just starting to grow. As I walk some parts of the routes so many times in a row I see them sowing the seeds, fertilizing, spraying with insecticide and harvesting. I also see how the crops change over time. Today’s reward were juvenile apples.


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My message is simple. During the pandemic, to avoid giving the virus an opportunity to leap between cantons, or from town to town, grab the opportunity to explore locally. You will be rewarded.

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A Homemade Electric Car – Youtube Video

Byrichard

On one side of the Channel, you have people like Colin Furze building fun machines that have the fatal flaw of having an internal combustion engine. On the other side of the Channel, you have people like Marc Gyver building an electric car with easily bought components. The video below shows the construction process without talking, and without music.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIznSec7BA


For about 2000 Euros, with bike parts, and the right skills, you can build your own cars. You have four powered bike wheels to power the car, two solar panels on the roof to generate 200W and a charge time of two and a half hours for a range of 20 kilometers and a top speed of 50 km/h. The range is perfect for when you need to do things within a short distance.


Four young people riding the electric car.


Within the video, you see quite a few shots of four people sitting in the car at once. I especially like this because it illustrates that young people are not limited to protests, skipping school and more. With the right skills, they build their own electric car to get around, even if it is on private property where it’s legal.


The project discussed above was uploaded seven months ago and since then he has made a car with a body, indicator lights, a windscreen and more. It looks like the cars you see in old films and cartoons. (Some of the cartoons are old). It is slowly getting closer to being road legal.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Smo1q9MbSg


What I love about these homemade projects is that they show that self-driven cars still have a future. With electric cars, we can still do small journeys without ecologists being mad with us for combusting fossil fuels.


Electric Car Adventures


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ulkuEIDA8


If we go off on a tangent of electric cars then you have electric cars like the one above. It’s designed so that you get the pleasure of driving a car, but without the internal combustion engine. There is an entirely new niche of projects to be thought up and programs like The Grand Tour and others could play with these devices.


For years I thought that Top Gear, Motortrend TV, and The Grand Tour were outdated and old fashioned, bound for the video archives of culture. With electric bike technology plenty of new opportunities are being created for electric cars, and in the process for our pleasure.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo3JzateMM4


An interview with the creator.


I love this concept. I love the concept of young people, rather than owning conventional cars like my generation have used, owning or renting devices as we see in the video below. Too often we watch news and current affairs programs about environmentalists and the future and we think we’ll be trapped on trains and in buses with no scheduling freedom. With these machines we preserve the freedom that we’ve been used to for years, but with technology that is sustainable.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB_yqSuaEFE
“Where we’re going, we don’t need rails”


The future of exploration is on foot, by bike and for those who want to cover different distances by Swincar. Cycling and walking are great when you’re not in the middle of a heatwave like we’ve experienced for two or three summers. In a heatwave, vehicles like this are nicer. As you’re rolling over earth, grass or stones you’re cooler than if you were on the tarmac. Because you’re outside you have the breeze. I would like to play with one of these.


The Negative side


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zWpyiLOutk


There are a few concerns with these machines. The first is that they still need to be parked somewhere and these take up as much space as a car. The second concern is that these vehicles can go anywhere but this doesn’t mean that they should. If they go on hiking paths, if they go on slopes, on skip pistes, and in other places then they’re going to come in conflict with other users of the same area.


We see a shot where these vehicles are beside horses, but if you have cycled near horses you’ll be told by the rider to make noise so that horses know you are there.


Off-Roading without the Carbon Footprint.


I enjoyed watching Dirt Every Day and programs like it but I never saw myself as ever trying offroading because of the carbon footprint. I’d rather hike, cycle or climb. I am tempted to play with the electric version. No need to worry about planting a forest after each outing.

Magnetic – Geneva premiere

Byrichard

Yesterday I went to Magnetic’s Geneva Premiere and I really enjoyed some segments of the film and found that others were less interesting. Keep in mind though, that this film is two hours long and that this increase and decrease in interest is normal. 



What made this screening special is that many of the people that we saw in the film were present at the event. Before the film started they were presented to us individually, said a few words and then one person won some skis and another won for tickets to a ski resort. 



The sports covered in this Nuit De La Glisse event were skiing, snowboarding mountain biking, e-mountain biking, speed flying, kite surfing, wind surfing and surfing. These sequences were shot in Hawaii, Tahiti, Spain, Portugal, Pakistan, France, Switzerland and one or two other countries. I don’t remember seeing that Portugal had some of the most consistently big waves. It would be impressive to see those waves in person. They can be up to 27 metres and more. Tahiti is a good place for riding barrel waves. 


It’s interesting to see a sequence with an e-mountain bike because the sport is still so new. It does make biking in the mountains seem more interesting, if it about more than riding on hiking trails or going down dedicated tracks. The biking sequences were fun. They might have changed how I feel about the growing popularity of mountain bikes in the mountains. The film has achieved something. 


Speed flying was filmed with a 360 camera and the image was stabilised so that the image was level but the flyer was moving from side to side as well as up and down. It was interesting to see how good this image quality was. I also like the use of the drone to film a variety of shots. Drones, when used correctly, provide the camera operator with the opportunity to get close to the subject without the use of a telephoto lens. This means that you preserve depth of field. This was used effectively in some of the mountain sequences, the surfing sequences and others. It made me want to get out and film with a selection of cameras. 

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K2 With a Drone

Byrichard

K2 with a Drone is a documentary following Petr Jan Juracka, a scientific photographer’s trip to K2 with Klara Kolouchova with two drones. He performed extensive testing before setting off on the trip. He flew the drone in a hyperbaric chamber to see how it would react. He flew it in freezing conditions to check that the batteries would cope and then he flew in other places.

He had already flown his drone in a multitude of countries and Pakistan was the latest challenge. We see the journey to base camp. We see images of the snow and ice, of rivers, of challenging roads and more. The documentary mixes fixed camera footage and drone footage in a pleasant to watch manner.

Thanks to God, to a lot of work of professional kindergarten teachers, great support of my parents and a lot of eye-training I see. And I see perfectly! Since the times my vision went good I enjoy every detail, every color and I admire any type of light. – Petr Jan Jura?ka

For some of the cold weather testing:

As I watched this documentary one question I wanted to have answered is how he powers his drone and other devices. Apparently he has a set of solar panels that he can deploy outside his tent. When acclimating at base camp solar panels would be ideal. There is no need to carry a heavy generator and fuel. You just bring a few weatherproof panels, deploy them on the side of the tent and wait for various batteries to charge. In that shot we see that the weather is overcast.

Overall this is an interesting documentary that I would expect to see at events  such as the Alpine Film Festival in Les Diablerets or the Montagne en Scène events. Combined with more footage of the climb of K2 it could provide for a more complete documentary.

Montagne en Scène Genève
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Montagne en Scène Genève

Byrichard

Au Vieux Campeur held the summer mountain film screening event at the Batiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva. They introduced the event as being the opportunity for them to share the passion of the mountains with people who may not be aware of the activities that are possible. They then went on to say “but as we’re having the screening in Geneva we know that you’re just half an hour from the mountains so many of you are practitioners and today we may even have participants from the cancelled Patrouille Des Glaciers.

Four films were shown at Montagne En Scène. The films shown were A Line Across the Sky, a documentary following two less experienced climbers as they attempt the Fitzroy traverse during a rare good weather window, Chasing Niagra, a documentary about Rafa Ortiz and his preparations to shoot the Niagra Falls in a Kayak. The third film is Mont Rebei Project, a documentary looking to achieve a new Rope Jump record.

The Last film, and my favourite is Valley Uprising. It takes a look at the American climbing scene from the fifties up to the Modern day. This documentary is great because it provides us with a deep understanding of the American climbing psyche. Mountain climbing is a sport of passion and so to see how different groups helped this passion progress over the years is interesting.

Film screenings are in Switzerland, France and Belgium

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Cave Exploration in Autumn РGrottes Aux F̩es РVallorbe

Byrichard

When the temperature drops and we find ourselves living beneath the clouds for weeks or even months going up to the mountains to get above them is always pleasant. Another option is to take advantage of the cool temperatures to explore caves where the conditions are constant year round. For Halloween a group of us went to have a bonfire and barbecue at the entrance to the Big cave of the Grottes des Fées.

[caption id="attachment_2665" align="aligncenter" width="660"]Improvised BBQ Improvised BBQ[/caption]

We explored both caves. We explored the large cave as far as it was possible to do, had a snack and then we went to the second smaller cave. The video below shows the entrance to that cave.

The video above is from when the snow melts. As the snow melts so much water is released at once that it floods the cave around once a year.

The cave system has 21 kilometres worth of tunnels, passages and more. Animal remains were found within, mainly fossils and cave bears. The earliest records of  this cave system date to the 1700s with more exploration taking place in the 1800s with notable water flow in the 1950s and again in the 1990s. Over the last decade people have explored the cave system using wind as a way of seeing where new passages could be found.

We see in many of the accounts written in french that an important aspect of cave exploration is finding the wind. It marks where big chambers are and where excavation of debris can take place to clear paths wide enough for people to cross through.

The large cave is easy to explore as it is possible to spend most of the time and there are no or at least very few squeezes. The large cave terminates at a metal door where progressing further is not possible unless you are with a trained guide to introduce you to the really interesting parts of the cave.

The small cave is more interesting to visit because it gets cramped and there are moments where you have to worm your way along. Either your arms are ahead of you or behind you. There is no way to move them once you cross through. In total there are two or three such passages. As it widens after these squeezes the motivation to explore remains intact.

Tomorrow we will finish exploring the little cave and in future, maybe in summer we will find a guide to help us explore the rest of the cave system.