Leif and Natalie

This year at the Slave river Paddlefest, we introduced a new event: the GIANT SLALOM. It's not just giant because it's on the Slave river, but it certainly helps. Giant Slalom from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . The course was on English channel, which was awesome. English channel is one of the smaller channels, but it's steeper, and because it's so little, all that gradient is much easier to handle. We started river left, above the main hole. There is a line to the left of the hole, which is faster because you don't have to ferry all the way out into the current before starting to move downstream. After the main hole, the rapid necks down a little and loses a lot of elevation as it drops into a big V wave. The "gate" was in the river right eddy. You had to circle around a rock outcropping over there. The V wave in the fastest part of the course was not playing nicely. It tended to toss people back to the left, away from that crucial eddy. T...

This post is a little overdue, because I've been focusing on facebook publicity lately and letting the blog fall behind. We have a new facebook athlete page (you should go "like" us). The objective is to have a way to share stuff with all those people that sent me friend requests even though we have never met. We set a goal of getting more likes than Todd Wells' facebook page. He may be a bigger deal (maybe), but there are two of us, so... I'm not sure Todd knows about this. I mean, we're not really super close friends or anything. But I'm getting off track. The Gore race is one of my favorite events. This is the sort of race that I seem to be able to do well at. Small mistakes have a minimal impact on your time. It's really more about endurance and some flatwater technique. Apparently I tend to average out better than a lot of other paddlers in that arena. For a few years now, the Gore race, for me, has been all about me versus Conor Flyn...

This post is long overdue, and I am not going to do this run any justice, but here is a video and some photos of our Boxelder season from this spring. Boxelder Creek, Wyoming from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . Boxelder is a strange little creek near Casper Wyoming. It has sort of a Cali feel, with a fair amount of exposed granite, but at the same time, it keeps that manky feel that Colorado is famous for. This year, we completely missed the good flow window because we were gone for a competition in Montana, so all we got was the ultra-low water shoulder. However, even at low water, Boxelder is a fun run, and we had a blast mobbing down this creek. There are a lot of challenges associated with Boxelder. The first is access. In the past, we have been able to use a nice easy putin at a bridge across the creek. You had to hop a fence and take about 10 steps over private land to get back to the river, and as far as I know, this was pretty much ok. However, somewhat recently, the...

I've been feverishly slaving away at the editing machine, turning the cracks, pulling the levers, and taping all that footage together, and the tireless efforts have finally paid off. It was worth the three weeks spent without any sleep and the hundreds of dollars spent. With no further ado, allow me to present the fully edited Spring Break video to go with this story . At the end of the video is Jakub Nemec's hail mary to beatdown at Celestial falls. Shit gets intense for a while, and may not be appropriate for younger viewers (Finn... Ollie...). However, Jakub came out of it ok, and we did find that paddle that everyone was yelling about so loudly ("Katrina! Get the paddle!"). Mostly it was Galen yelling, because it was his paddle that Jakub was borrowing. I debated leaving out the beatdown, but decided to stick it in there for a couple reasons. The rest of the video is good clean fun, since I carefully removed all appearances by anyone associated with BDP. ...

It's amazing how my life just seems to go on hold whenever we come back from a trip. Since returning from Chile, I have felt like I have barely had any time to edit photos or video. However, by assigning smaller homework assignments and skipping out on my research, I finally managed to put together a little video with the footage from our Grand Prix trip to Chile. Chile Grand Prix trip from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . While on the final push of editing, I couldn't quite find a spot for the GoPro footage from the day where I swam on the Nevados. I wanted to sort of show the mini-story there, but there just wasn't a good place for it in the song, so I slapped together a short video of just the swim itself. Thus far, the video of the swim, which I spent about 10 seconds assembling, has been more popular than the main Chile video, which I worked on over the course of several weeks. Hopefully this says more about the paddling public than it does about my editing skills. ...

If you live in Colorado, summer has been over for about 13 months now. However, if you're an international rock star, the party never stops, and the season is endless. You can guess which category Natalie and I are in. We had an awesome summer this year. Early in the season, we collected a lot of creekboating footage around Colorado for Natalie's 2012 Grand Prix application . It was good that we did that early, because the Colorado season never really happened this year. That didn't matter to us, though, because we were off to Idaho for the North Fork Championships and playboating on the Salmon, then onward to the Colombia Gorge, Skookumchuck, British Colombia , and finally our home away from home, the Slave River in the Northwest Territories. We playboated, creekboated, and just had a great time traveling around. For the majority of the trip, we were joined by Markus and Maria from Germany, who are on a year-long sabbatical, traveling, kayaking, and raising money ...

For more than a year now, we have been scheming and plotting, hoping to get Natalie invited to the 2012 Whitewater Grand Prix in Chile. We were about 6 months ahead of schedule making an application video ( which you can see here ). We had it finished before they even announced the location and format of the 2012 Grand Prix. Of course, as we know now, the 2012 event is going to be exclusively creek races, no freestyle events, so our original video, which was designed to show how well rounded of a paddler she was, no longer actually addressed the event. So we gathered more footage around Colorado, British Colombia, and basically wherever we could find water, and we put together this video: Natalie Anderson Grand Prix entry video from Leif Anderson on Vimeo . We barely got it done before the deadline, which was funny since in a way we had been working on it for over a year. I was pretty proud of my fancy editing work. Not so much the editing itself (although I am proud of tha...

I wrote a blog post a while back about some of the mounts and accessories that I had built for my GoPro, along with a video that got surprisingly popular (the article can be found right here ). I've been thinking about it, and I decided to expand a little bit, and talk more directly about my philosophy of filming with the GoPro. Also, I built another stern mount, which I'll describe first. If you want to skip straight to the philosophy, click here . The new stern mount is a little lower profile. The Narwhal mount from last time provides a better view of the surroundings, but it's not right for every situation. It sticks up really high, so flipping over is not advised, and swimming is very bad. Also, if you do flip over, or brush the mount against a rock wall or something, it tends to get loose and start wobbling a lot. To fix all these issues in one fell swoop, I designed the new stern mount. It's a little specific to my boat (Fluid Bazooka) but the basic idea ...

Here is a video that I put together from the weekend. I didn't have much footage of other people, so it's mostly my personal race experience. Enjoy! It's that time of year again, where I scramble into the car and book it back to Colorado from the Slave River, just barely in time for Gore Race. This year, I trained extra hard while I was up at the Slave, trying to paddle hard for about 10-20 minutes on flatwater every day. Also, this year I had the large Bazooka, a very fast but still very manuverable boat. I was primed for a rematch against Conor Flynn, my nemesis. Conor is a fast paddler. We've had a rivalry for a long time. At the last Gore race, Conor took first in the creekboat class, with me in 6th. My private goal this year was to beat Conor. Come race day, I was feeling pretty stoked. Conor and I paddled in together across the flatwater, each of us paddling a little faster than we were comfortable, but trying to pretend that it was easy. He was th...

I'm sure someone has used that title before for their Colorado tour, but before you say anything, watch our video. ... Now, having watched the video, ask yourself: could anyone else be as rad as that? The Colorado season is usually a short season, but this year has been exceptional. Not exceptionally good - quite the opposite. It's now the end of May, and competitions are just beginning to get started, but many of the rivers have already peaked. Natalie and I have been dashing around the state trying to get on as much as we can before the drought really starts. We are making a special effort to get a lot of shots of Natalie, since we have the official word that the Whitewater Grand Prix will be selecting one women's wild card spot based on video submissions. We put together a promo for Natalie way back at the beginning of last fall to try to get this spot, but that was before we knew that the format for the 2012 WWGP would be entirely racing. Our old promo was m...

Or, for my kayaking audience: Sweet ill stuff to do while yo leg is broke. Specially if you are ballin on a budget. Brown. EDIT: I have written another article, featuring a newer stern mount, but also a short essay about my philosophy of GoPro filming. You can check it out here . Well, as you all know, I recently broke my leg, so I can't kayak for a while. During my downtime, I have been playing around with my camera equipment, and I thought I would write a post about some of the cool things that you can do to your GoPro. The GoPro HD cameras have revolutionized action cinematography, because they are so accessible and yet so high quality. I am still learning, but here are a couple of tips and modifications that I have found that help you get even more professional looking results with a minimal investment. I started this article by just writing about the time lapse tools, but then I just had to make a video showing them in action, and then it all spiraled out of cont...