Wannabe Travel Show: Sawtooth

Four years had passed since the last episode of the Wannabe Travel Show. The Canon C100 had been replaced. The 5D Mark III had been upgraded. I’d moved to Tennessee, settled into a routine, and mostly stopped thinking about making travel videos.

Then 2020 happened.

I don’t need to explain 2020 to anyone. You were there. We were all there. Locked down, masked up, watching the world from our windows. By the time restrictions started to ease and people were allowed to travel again, I needed to get out. Not wanted. Needed.

Idaho was the answer. Specifically, the Sawtooth National Forest. A place long marked as “Want to Go” on my Google Maps.

Golden meadow at dusk with the Sawtooth Mountains in the background — Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho

One More Episode

I didn’t set out to revive the show. But I felt I owed it to those still stuck at home. To remind them what’s still out there. A proof of life.

The Sawtooth Mountains are the kind of place that makes you wonder how you didn’t know about them sooner. Jagged granite peaks, alpine lakes so clear you can see the bottom from fifty feet up, and hardly a soul around. It’s like someone took the best parts of the Rockies and hid them in central Idaho where nobody would think to look.

Jagged Sawtooth peaks lit by golden hour light — Sawtooth Mountains at golden hour

The experience at Sawtooth was nothing short of a perfected routine. I’d wake up at 4am, down a Kombucha, and be hitting the trailheads by 5am. Hike a mountain, have breakfast at the summit, feeding my scraps to the curious chipmunks. Then descend the mountain, visit a ghost town or two, have dinner, go to bed, and do it all again the next day. Exhausting, but incredibly worth it.

The only drag on the trip was doing it all while inhaling wildfire smoke. The region was in the middle of a bad fire season. It gave the photos and footage an eerie, layered quality, which the camera loved. But not my respiratory system.

Four years of growth showed. The footage was cleaner, the editing tighter, the eye more practiced. But the feeling was the same. Just me, a camera, and a place that didn’t care who I was or what year it was or what was happening in the world outside the tree line.

Hiking boots resting on rocks overlooking an alpine lake and mountain peak — Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho

The Point of It All

Why keep making these? Because making is the point in and of itself.

Getting out when every desire is to just stay home. Exploring a place so thoroughly you can feel it in your legs for days. Editing the footage until the memory is locked in forever. Standing in front of something beautiful with a camera in your hand is one of the few things that makes complete sense to me. And until I met my wife, these mountains had to do.

Creek bed and fallen timber framing a granite peak through the trees — Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho

Someday when I’m old and can’t remember any of this, I’ll pull up these videos and it’ll all come back. The Ring Road in Iceland, the national parks out west, and the Sawtooth Mountains during the strangest year any of us have lived through.

I’ll press play, and the proof will be right there. What a remarkable gift.