fresh from the field...guest blogger willy forsyth
A couple of months ago my friend Bryan Farley told me about these guys who were walking down the coast of Baja and making a documentary about it. I had been to Baja quite a few times in the past couple of years and had been getting pretty stoked on the place and it's seemingly endless potential for adventure and uncrowded surf.
Bryan invited me to take a trip down and meet up with the guys who were walking the coast, two guys I had met before named Justin Deshields and Bryan Morales. It sounded like a good opportunity but I had already committed to a trip to Thailand for my work with the Alaska Air National Guard, but as the sequestration of the government started to take effect and cuts in spending happened the Thailand trip also got cut, so I decided to take the time off and head down to Baja for the fifth time in as many months.
I knew from the start this was not going to be like my other recent trips where the main goal was to find waves. We were trying to meet up with these Guys and help them out, and it ended up being quite a little adventure tracking these guys down.We ended up spending an extra day after we arrived at the point we were supposedly supposed to rendezvous at in a wild goose chase searching for these guys. Driving up and down the coast from point to point taking every little deviation of dirt road we could find and asking everyone we came across if they had seen two gringos walking along, one with a surfboard on his back. We ended up meeting a couple people who had had seen them, but they each said "they were here yesterday and left about midday to walk south." so after an extended hardy boys type search along about a fifteen mile stretch of coast in which I discovered quite a few nice beaches I will definitely return to, we returned to the town we passed through the day we rolled in just before heading to the coast for the search.
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| Justin Deshields, Bryan Farley and Bryan Morales |
We ended up finding them at the little tienda in town that we had stopped at the day we rolled in, and as we came to find out that they walked into just about forty five minutes after we had left. We had ended driving a big circle past them as we went north to look for them while they were walking south. It was a fun little chase and in the end we ended up having a couple days to help the guys out with filming and photographing some of their project as they walked the coast and heard some of their stories of the wild and weird land that is Baja.
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| peelers out the back |
Looking forward to their final product which is aimed at raising awareness about the awesome wilderness that is baja and inspiring us all to try and keep it that way. Check out their website and their featured blog on Nat Geo which may be featuring some photos by yours truly. -Willy Forsyth
