faroe islands | PATAGONIA
"The rock formations were other worldly, and around each corner there seemed to be an equally, and if not more bizarre and primordially beautiful sea stack, spiny arête, or vertigo inducing sea cliff."
Some people have described the Faroe's as one of the greatest European wildernesses - thanks in part to the two million pairs of seabirds; guillemots, fulmars, storm petrels and, of course, the famously cute puffins.
But for Luke Nelson and I, who had not been to the Faroe islands before - we were here on a week long exploratory running mission to shoot catalogue and editorial images for PATAGONIA - the geology of the place was most remarkable.
FUN HOGGING
Around the turn of the century (I love saying that) a friend of mine gave me an old video cassette tape to watch. It was a forgotten film called Mountain of Storms. It’s a beautifully chronicled road trip taken back in 1968 with Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Dick Dorworth and Lito Tejada-Flores. They drove a van from Ventura, California all the way to the bottom of South America (Patagonia) to climb a mountain. On the way down they surfed waves that had never been ridden, skied down live volcanoes, and got into all kinds of mishaps and misadventures. At the end of the film, on the summit of Mount Fitz Roy, they held up an orange customized flag. It read: “Viva Los Fun Hogs.” Wow, I thought, fun hogging… I didn’t know there was a name for it.
"When you can't get your running kit on fast enough!"
