Almost like a scene from the movie “Fitzcarraldo,” classical pianist Paul Barton lugged an old piano up into the highlands of the mountainous region of Kanchanaburi, Thailand, to play for old and injured elephants at a protected nature reserve. *Elephant-lovers please rest-assured,” says Barton on his YouTube page, “all keys on modern pianos (such as this one) are made from synthetic plastic material and have been manufactured this way for some considerable time.” For more on the elephants, go here: ‘Elephant’s World’ Kanchanaburi. ‪ And what were the pachyderms listening to? Slow movement (2) from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata.

This 2000 U.K. ad for John West canned salmon was made for the British market.
It’s bear vs. man.  It still draws a hearty chuckle.

To extreme skiing aficionados worldwide, the name Jamie Pierre is a familiar one. In the video here, Pierre set a world-record jump in 2006 by jumping off the backside of Wyoming’s Grand Targhee Resort. It’s as if he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Sadly, this past weekend, he died over the weekend in an avalanche at Utah’s Snowbird ski resort.

The new, powerful eco-documentary, “The Last Mountain,” focuses on the widespread harmful effects of the mining technique called mountaintop removal on West Virginia’s Coal River Valley. Simply put, the mining company dynamites the entire top of a mountain to extract the coal hidden beneath. Except there’s a very big  problem. The local inhabited area is also ruined– poisoned water, air pollution, massive sludge dumps, floods, cancer clusters. Who’s to blame for all this devastation? The villain is Massey Energy, which is the state’s largest coal company. According to the documentary which played at the Sundance Film Festival, 500 Appalachian mountains have been destroyed by this same process. But Coal River Valley residents have said, “Enough is enough!” They are fighting back. They are the heroes of this must-see film.

This video, which was created by the U.S. government, is an animation of the massive path of the Honshu tsunami triggered by the 8.9 earthquake on Thursday night. Less than 12 hours after the devastating quake struck just off the northern coast of Japan, waves reached California. Crescent City in the north was the coastal town first hit, with eight-foot waves battering the shore. About 35 boats were sunk or otherwise destroyed. In Santa Cruz, water surged into a harbor, sinking or overturning more than a dozen boats.

Green Tunnel from Kevin Gallagher on Vimeo.

Be patient and you will be justly rewarded: “Green Tunnel” video starts around the 15-second mark. And what a video!
Kevin Gallagher, a Richmond, Virginia-based filmmaker, took footage from his six-month trek along the 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail and condensed 4,000 photos into a single five-minute video to accompanying music. While Gallagher is not a RailRiders Adventure Clothing customer, many Appalachian Trail hikers, including several hardy thru-hikers, are. A full quality version is available for purchase on DVD. Go to smtgltd.bigcartel.com/ and look for it on Stephen Vitiello.

Eric Jacqmain, a clever 19-year old from Indiana, built his own backyard solar death-ray with the intensity of 5,000 suns (at least he claims this), by adhering over 5,000 small mirrors to a satellite dish. This do-it-yourself project cost him only $90 to build. While RailRiders is known for its sun-blocking clothing, we’d have to admit that it would be no match for Eric’s solar killer-torch.

Persistence hunting, as many of us learned by reading Christopher McDougall’s account of the Kalahari Bushmen in the national bestseller, Born To Run, involves an age-old yet now practically extinct form of tracking in which hunters, equipped with spears or bows and arrows pursued prey to the point of the animal’s exhaustion. Because humans can sweat to reduce body heat and their quadruped prey can not, humans are able to run for many miles and for an extended period of time. We are the only primates who have the physiological gifts necessary for endurance running. Persistence hunting evolved two million years ago. Part 10 of David Attenborough’s documentary,”The Life of Mammals,” showed a Bushman running after a kudu antelope for eight consecutive hours until it collapsed from utter exhaustion.  No one knows to what extent the Bushmen continue to hunt this way, or how many are still able to run an animal to death. Make sure you watch closely at the 3:00-3:20 mark in the video to see his desert footwear.