With time lapse photography and some whimsical music, even the weariest hiker can look like he’s having fun.

Sometimes getting to camp means going the extra mile -uphill.  Four thousand feet uphill.  It took six hours and six miles of backpacking to reach the base of the Sahale Glacier, in the North Cascades National Park.  The last quarter mile was the steepest.  If the mountain had a middle finger, the final boulder field below the glacier was it.

Time to set up camp, but first tripod and camera.  Exhausted, with the wind gusting over 30 mph, a room at the Hilton seemed like a better option. The space between level ground for the tent and the rocky steepness up  down and around me, was limited.  It took ten minutes to excavate a platform stable enough to keep the tripod and camera from toppling over.  That would happen later (the toppling over).

Many cameras, professional and consumer, now have a feature called an “interval timer.”  It lets you program your camera to take multiple pictures over a set period of time.  This video  is a composite of 705 images using the interval timer, one every second for 705 seconds.  I then used Photoshop software to compile the images into the video above.  The software gives different options for playback rates.  I tried several, and liked fifteen frames per second best.

All content (photography, video, writing) ©2012 Adam Bacher.