While I did a lot of things in Eagle for the school and the community, I had my own projects as well. The main one was starting this video tour journal. When the Alska tour forst started to come together and I thought of doing this journal, Eagle seemed like the l;ogical place to try and get started. I had a good workspace and planned to be here about three weeks, long enough to get started on it. I was also about halfway through the tour, which meant that I both had footage to work with, and I had a couple months ahead on the road to try and do videos as I went.

So in between the classes and stopping to help anyone that came by for information or to try a hand at using the equipment, I bagan the project. Though I had a Digital Video PCI card I'm using now, a DV500, with me; I didn't install it. The sad truth it that I was afraid it would cause too mant hassles for my short time here, as well as possibly crashing my system when I needed it available to record every day. So I just used my AGP card and its software, which was crude, but effective. The principle of the journal was jsut that, to be "quick, rough sketches" as I went along, with no time for a lot of production. It takes most of my time to live the life, so reporting on it has to be something that isn't difficult, that I can work into the routine.

I di it, made the introduction and the first few videos, and worked out the basic process I still use. It is still a work in progress as I want to try different things. As I am still pressed for time, I am covering a lot of ground fast, just giving glimpses of scenes that could take up a whole video by themselves. Maybe someday I'll be able to do that, bring it down to a finer focus. But for now, it is enough that it is happening. I also wrote a new song, "Jam on the Beach" while thinking of Mexico and Belize, and recorded it right then, but nothing complete enough to use. In this video I used a version I recorded a 6 weeks later while visiting a good friend in Montana, Joe, a great slide player. We had the gear set up and he jammed around on this one for a while, me singing and playing rythum on the other electric. You'll see and hear more of Joe later in the journals.

There'd been a bit of snow, dusting the mountains; then a major storm hit with lots of snow and sub-zero temperatures. We were socked in for days by the blizzard, but after a day to let them plow the road, I took off. The road is only plowed for another week or so, then is closed till spring. So off I went on a hair-raising drive, but I made it to Tok, slow and careful, to spend a cold night in the pick-up at -15 degrees.