This is Teamwork

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One hill. Three hikes. - While I seldom top-land and therefore have to hike up each of the mountains I fly from, Lyndsay has to hike both up, and down each time that happens. A great paraglider pilot herself, she has generously chosen to place documenting the expedition before her own flying and, because of the significant bulk and weight of her camera gear, is playing it smart and electing to hike back down instead.

Thank you Lyndsay! <3

This is Teamwork

November 22nd, 2020

As a documentary filmmaker, I've become known as a lone wolf. Working alone has not only saved me financially, it has also afforded me complete, creative control over my process.

But there's downsides to the solo-show as well. For one, it's lonely. Perhaps more significantly, it's limiting aesthetically, as much of the footage needs to be captured by the discipline of repetitive camera placement, annihilating any possibility of authentic, off-the-cuff material.

Enter Lyndsay Nicole.

Welcome Lyndsay - Lyndsay Nicole is not only the most beautiful woman in the world, she's also a badass paraglider pilot and, most-important for this expedition, a badass photographer/filmmaker as well.

She has played a significant role in dreaming up the Monarca project with me and through her work, we will be able to experience this insane journey through a sane-lens -- hopefully.

Lyndsay is not just my best friend and partner, she is also a strong and creative paraglider pilot that has generously volunteered her time to support the documentary tasks of the Fly Monarca Expedition. Throughout my self-propelled journey, she will travel and work autonomously from Turtle, the Chevy Astrovan, named not only for its color, but speed characteristics as well.

Why the change?

It was during the three weeks of post-expedition b-roll that she shot with me after my expedition two years ago that we realized the value of our teamwork. The drone and gimbal-stabilized 4k material she captured then were the meat and potatoes of our award-winning documentary, "The Endless Chain", and inspired us to further our efforts for the Monarca expedition.

Montezuma's Revenge - Montezuma Peak is scary as s**t. Not to break the world pun record here but I dropped a deuce on launch as a nervous reaction to imagining myself contending with this brown pile of intimidating cactus, rock and wind.

Like a fly on poop, I swirled around, took a spanking, then sped back, straight into the bowl, as if I needed to go for another whirl. Hours later, I was still taking another crack at the a-hole of a peak as it passed wind and I, ultimately, got flushed down the backside.

Instead of joining me post-expedition, this time she'll catch it all live! As I leap, and sometimes crawl, forward on this journey, Lyndsay will be there at (almost) every turn; hiking up mountains capturing that 4k gold, then making her way back down before chasing me as I head north.

This is new, this is exciting, this is Teamwork.

Ben

Camping Buddy

Teamwork

The Zen Ginger

Eye Spy

Stand back, Lyndsay got this.

Enter Lyndsay

Butterflies of a Feather

My Best Friend

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Monarch Watch is a volunteer-based, citizen science organization, and an affiliate of the Kansas Biological Survey. Their main focus is on the annual North American migration of the Monarch butterfly. The organization creates and distributes tags to place on monarch butterflies in order to track their migration path from Canada and the United States to Mexico. The first monarch citizen science program was launched in the 1950s and, since then, thousands of volunteers have made fundamental contributions to our accumulating knowledge of monarch biology. [right:image:23952][/]The Monarch Watch initiative's tagging program aims to associate the point of capture of each butterfly with the point of recovery. The data obtained is used to determine the migratory routes of the monarchs, the influence of the weather on their journey, and survival rates, among other factors. The program involves more than 2,000 schools, nature centers, and other organizations in the U.S. and Canada, as well as an estimated more than 100,000 students and adults who participate in tagging activities each fall. Scientists know a lot about the migration of Monarch butterflies, because they have received information about more than 2,000,000 monarchs over the years. By working together across North America, they continue to support the Monarch Butterfly populations by providing resources, data, scientific research and information about all things Monarch. If you ask them, they would tell you it is citizen scientists who are responsible for saving the Monarch butterfly, a species at risk in all three North American countries; Mexico, the United States, and Canada. No effort is too small to have a positive impact. For more information on how to get involved, please visit the official Monarch Watch [url=http://monarchwatch.org]website[/url]. References: [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_Watch]Wikipedia[/url] [url=https://biosurvey.ku.edu/monarch-watch]University of Kansas Biological Survey[/url] [url=https://www.cloca.com/post/monarch-watch-are-you-ready]Central Lake Ontario Conservation[/url] [url=http://www.namonarchs.org/es/proyectos-piloto/monarch-watch-migration-tagging-project]Monarch Conservation Toolbox[/url] [url=https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/65/4/419/255008]Oxford Academic[/url]