Karen held down the fort while I ran away to Utah to hang out with friends for a classic canyoneering trip. We’ve done it with the kids also, but it was nice to have an adults trip. Jon and I were trying to count how many canyons we’ve done to date; we decided I’m near three dozen and he’s definitely done more. Man I love going out to canyon country to hang out with good friends.
Sometime during Covid I started building and flying drones, FPV (“first person view”, where one flies in more of a manual flight mode, which is not your grandma’s DJI mavic). It’s a time-consuming, pricey, sometimes frustrating hobby, and I’m not a great pilot yet, but I had a great time flying over the canyons. It’s a very different kind of risk. With the goggles, one can get a bit of the feeling of actually diving on the canyon, dropping from the sky, inverting, etc. Not to mention I have many hundreds of dollars wrapped up in the drone (countless hours of time), and it wasn’t behaving in a reliable way. Every time I got down below the rim of the canyon I would lose video feed, and put it into a “return to home” mode, and just hope for the best. If it had gone down just about anywhere over the canyon, it would have been irretrievable. Add to that the super gusty 20 mph winds, and there were good odds that if I put that drone over a canyon, it would end up lost forever. Is it strange that flying the drone way out there felt more exhilarating on this trip than swimming through the depths of a slot canyon with drips of rain coming down from above? Anyway, I’ve got some story and footage below. If you want only the in-air footage, that would be the last (third) video below.
