Climb The Rockies

In 1988, I quit my job to pursue a dream. I produced “Climb The Rockies: A Video Trail Guide to the Colorado Mountains”. It was distributed via VHS video tape, before the emergence of the Internet. The concept was to let climbers watch scenes of the climb before setting out. I shot almost all of the footage on Volume 1. Philip Wegener was the videographer for Volume 2. As a business I lost money, and I couldn’t afford to produce Volume 3. But I had fun, met a lot of interesting people, and created something I’m still proud of.

I promoted the video using a 30-minute documentary of an attempt to climb the North Face of Longs Peak. It was shown numerous times on The Learning Channel and included a 60 second Per Inquiry, or “PI”, ad. That’s the type of ad seen on late night television with an offer including a Toll-Free telephone number.

The Longs Peak 30-minute documentary can be seen as the very last video shown below.

The following segments are an AI enhanced version of the original video shot on S-VHS with a 4:3 aspect ratio and 480 lines of resolution. The AI enhancement changes the aspect ratio to 16:9, and upscales the resolution to 1080 lines. It improves the original but is not High Definition. Someday, I hope AI can improve the video to display the images in real HD, perhaps someday rendering it in 3-D, as if you were there.

All of these segments are hosted on YouTube. Search for “Climb The Rockies video trail guide.”