 |
| Columbia River West to Ruthton Point Ruthton Park. Hood River, Oregon. April 25, 2013 |
It's Saturday, I've been down with the flu for a week and a half, and I've got a lot on my plate that I want to accomplish today with the HCRH project, but before diving in I wanted to do a quick overall project update (mostly to help sort out my own thoughts on how to move ahead).
Looking back at the videos from 2015 (a half-decade ago!), you'll see that there were ambitions for this project that were clearly never met. Without going into detail, let's just say a lot of life happened right as I was gearing up for production on the feature-length documentary in late 2015 and those next few years were difficult years, to say the least...
Very little creative work on anything was possible during that time, and there were a lot of setbacks involving the work already completed on the film. Data loss on the website, requiring the rebuild I am currently working on, lost footage and stills, which may be recovered in the future, the fate of those hard drives is still undetermined... Heartbreaking, since a lot of that material is irreplaceable due to construction of the HCRH State Trail in the Gorge and to the general passage of time. There was also a significant loss of gear and equipment that made further progress on the film impossible at the time...
Anyway, life is much better now and, while I was unable to meet the 2016 goal for the movie and the 2018 goal for a book, I did get a book out in 2019! It just had nothing to do with the highway, was fiction, and was written by someone else! That work took almost all of 2019 to complete, further delaying this project, but it is work that I am very proud of.
Upon publication of The Yellow Painted Man last year, after a brief break, it is now time to return to the highway. This return has been further motivated by the excellent work Kirk J. Pool and several other folks have been doing recently documenting the Lower Highway (including the first decent explorations of the Bagby Loops that I know of!). Their work can be followed on the US 30 Remnants from Astoria to Eastern Oregon group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/483015922488601). It is an excellent group and definitely worth joining if you enjoy the exploring the history of the highway.
So, now it is 2020 and I've started rebuilding the website. For now, that is going to be my primary goal. Movies, books, whatever... It all needs to start with getting the site back up and running, so that is all that I am going to worry about at the moment. After that, we'll see what life holds.
 |
| Recreating the HCRH: "New" Website January 18, 2020 https://sites.google.com/site/recreatingthehcrh/home |
I will say, this project started with researching a planned short film on the original route of the highway (filming on that was mostly completed by the end of 2015), and I really do hope that is where this leads in the end. Whether or not that happens may depend on if the old footage is recovered along with several other factors. Losing that footage is not necessarily a deal breaker, though. Any hesitation I have at this point in declaring the film alive (or, at least, undead) really comes from being a bit gun shy after the setbacks a few years ago.
As for a book, well, that might actually come before the movie now. We'll see how things go. But, as I said, first things first: it all starts with rebuilding the website, a pretty significant project all on its own.
The first stage will be reformatting for the new platform while rebuilding the dead photo links. That, in and of itself, will be a fairly sizable project. I had to do that once before and it took about six weeks of eight hour days to complete. Today, the site is much larger and more complex than it was then and my "free" time to work on this labor of love is much reduced, so just completing this stage of the work may take months.
While rebuilding, I will also be updating the site with new material as it comes up, so there will be some forward motion this year, it all won't just be rebuilding what's been lost.
The second stage, surely occurring, to some degree, concurrently with the first step, will be filling in gaps in my research and "completing" the site per my original goals for it.
After that, we'll find out what seems to be the best way to proceed.
This project has always been a fun adventure, and I look forward to moving ahead with it, whatever the future may hold!
