Standing on American Summit, a windswept, snowy mountaintop sparsely
colonized by mangled and stunted ice-plastered trees stuck in the frosty
Alaskan air at 3,420 feet, Becky Bristow panned the landscape with her video
camera to capture the pastel mauves and pinks of the northern sunset.
From a distance she heard the jingling of dogsled harnesses, and as they
drew closer, the panting of 14 huskies and their musher’s exerted shouts as
they crossed over the cold, lonely summit en route from Fairbanks, Alaska to
Whitehorse, Yukon.
This was but one of 31 such teams that bounded from the start line of
the Yukon Quest sled dog race — known as the toughest sled dog race in the
world. One thousand miles of frigid northern wilderness. Ten thousand feet
elevation gain. No substitution of dogs. If a racer kills a moose en route,
they must salvage the meat before continuing. Fastest time the race has ever
been won: 7 days, 7 hours. On average, one out of three racers doesn’t finish.
Some years it’s half the field.
“On American Summit, the sun was setting, you could hear the dog teams
coming from a long way away,” Bristow recalled. “I watched the sun set for a
long time, there was ice on the trees. It made me realize the beauty of the
place they were seeing with their dog teams, and why they do it.”
Why they do it was a question that drew Bristow to spend six cold weeks
of the 2004 winter capturing the racers’ journey on camera to create
Dog
Gone Addiction: Inspired by the Women of the Yukon Quest
, a 67-minute adventure
documentary that’s part of the 2007 Whistler Film Festival lineup.
The film features three women — seasoned veteran Kelley Griffin, and
rookie mushers Agatha Frankzac and Michelle Phillips, who is cheered on by her
four-year-old son Keegan — and their four legged teammates who answer to such
names as Ferdinand, Malachi, Daisy, Zippo and Denali.
The film also showcases the unfettered northern landscape, a frozen
world of sturdy forests, bare willow bushes and icy riverbeds through which the
sled teams pass, so tiny amidst that wilderness that when filmed from a
helicopter the only clue to their presence comes with their movement.
“I wanted to make a movie about women who were inspiring — inspiring to
other women, and to other people,” Bristow explained. “And I wanted to make a
movie about the north. I keep getting drawn to the north. I was curious about
the mushing community, about the race, and I was also really interested in
where they got to go by dogsled — they got to see a lot.”
Bristow too, saw a lot, and her film bursts to life with dogs yelping
and tugging at their harnesses with their pink tongues dangling, while a Bearfoot
Bluegrass soundtrack augments the excitement like the fluffy powder snow kicked
up behind the huskies’ bootie-wrapped feet.
But it’s in the quieter details that Bristow captures the remoteness,
the devotion and the flavour of northern life — mushers gently massaging their
dogs’ paws in minus 50 Celsius temperatures; mushers’ swollen faces framed by
frosty white hair and fur trimmed parka hoods; Phillips hacking frozen salmon
meat with an axe to feed her team; spirited Frankzac recalling how as a child in
Poland she told her sceptical mother she would grow up to live in a cabin in
the woods with lots of dogs.
“I totally lucked into her,” Bristow said of Frankzac, the film’s most
colourful character. “She’s passionate and she’s hilarious. She was really candid
in front of the camera, just so herself. As a rookie, people can relate to her.
No matter how many times I saw her on the screen during the editing, she still
made me laugh.”
Released earlier this year,
Dog Gone Addiction
won Best Adventure Sport Film at
the Taos Mountain Film Festival in October, and was runner up for the People’s
Choice Award at the Wakana Mountain Film Festival in New Zealand.
" Dog Gone Addiction is adventure filmmaking at its very best,” says Les Guthman, a New York based producer of award winning adventure documentaries. “It gives us poignant and sharp portraits of the mushers and their dog gone addictions, along with majestic, bone-chilling coverage of what must be the coldest race on earth. In the lives of these three women, Becky shows us an essence of the raw human will to compete and the drive to test oneself that transcends class and gender and adventure celebrity; for those who know not too much about sled dogs, the film is a revelation about a powerful will to compete that transcends species as well.”
• • •
Growing up in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Bristow was an active 4-H
member who jumped horses and showed cattle and steers. She loved embarking on
multi-day canoe trips with her dad, and cherishes memories of a 10-day pack
horse trip through the Canadian Rockies in celebration of her 11
th
birthday.
In her second year of university — she graduated from the University of
Calgary with a
Kinesiology degree in 1999 — Bristow
spent her summer guiding for Blast, an
inflatable kayak tour operator running trips on the Red Deer, Sheep and
Highwood Rivers.
“It was more about being on the river, sharing my passion with people,”
Bristow, 31, said. “I like teaching people how to do something they’ve never
done before, and watching them realize they can do it. It’s pretty rewarding.”
For her first multi-week road trip, she loaded up her camping and
kayaking gear to paddle the Quesnel and Cariboo Rivers in the Williams Lake
area. She’s been exploring ever since.
In 2000, she travelled with friends for three months in Ecuador,
climbing, backpacking, surfing and kayaking. Before long they had paddled all
the known rivers, so a local acquaintance suggested they explore the river
behind his papaya farm.
“There was a gorge that led to a 40-foot waterfall that led into another
gorge,” Bristow recalled. “I got to do the first descent of a 40-footer. We
should have planned for two days, but we didn’t, so we paddled the rest in the
dark and camped on the rocks under a space blanket.”
Smitten by expedition life, in 2003 she travelled to Bhutan for a month,
a trip she remembers as her favourite.
“That country is so magical,” Bristow said. “We got to do a first
descent there, and we took some local Bhutanese with us. We hiked up and over
three mountain passes. We took horses and carried boats for three and a half
days to access the river. Then we paddled down some awesome whitewater — some
of the Bhutanese were quite talented. Just the hiking to get to the river was
quite an experience.”
A trip to Iran in 2005, however, via France, Greece and Turkey, was her
scariest.
“It was the hottest climate I’ve ever been in, and we had to wear
headscarves and long pants all the time,” she said. “We had lots of stuff
stolen, including film footage. We had to be really smart about where to camp,
and about things like whether to show our camera or not. But then we met people
who were totally awesome, who were nice and giving and wanted to share.”
Shortly after her Ecuador trip, Bristow encountered a Teton Gravity
Research film crew while she was paddling in Revelstoke, which she now calls
home after purchasing a small house in 2006. The guys asked her for some local
beta, and then invited her to appear in their film.
“At first it was just a bunch of us boating, paddling together, and I
was really excited to paddle with a solid crew,” Bristow said of appearing in
kayaking films. “Then it was cool trips to Norway it was neat to go to all
these different countries and see all the different cultures — and I got to
paddle awesome whitewater. I didn’t really think about the camera aspect of it.
There’s a certain connection with people at that level of your sport, all amped
up about paddling the next river together. It’s great having a solid crew to go
do first descents with.”
While her determination and apparent lack of fear are impressive, says
Jeff Croft, a long-time friend and paddling partner who worked with her as a
B.C. forest fire fighter, Bristow is a thorough planner and competent leader.
“ Becky's sense of adventure, spirit and outdoor skills are truly legendary,” Croft said. “She’s a picture of determination, natural ability and infectious positive energy in all stages of planning a trip, whether it’s for a day or many days. She’s not overconfident or bragging, but quietly confident setting up and running a drop and then exuberant afterwards. And she’s a friend to everyone on the river, safety conscious and aware, very likeable and totally self sufficient.”
That same determination and self sufficiency served Bristow well in Alaska and the Yukon, as she arranged helicopter flights to access remote locations and filmed Phillips on training runs from a sled speeding along trails winding through snowy bushes and in night time temperatures that dropped to minus 51 Celsius.
“A lot of the race is at night, there’s only six and a half hours of
daylight,” Bristow explained. “I met people at the start banquet weeks before
the race, and arranged skidoo and vehicle rides to wait with photographers for
the mushers. I wanted to capture what they were going through. It (the cold)
was fine until my camera crapped out one night. It got down to minus 51, and it
started tweaking out, the audio wasn’t working. It was really frustrating, it
was right after Michelle had had an accident on the descent from Eagle Summit.”
As soon as she finished feeding and caring for her dogs, an excited
Phillips took shelter inside the check stop building to talk about her crash,
but Bristow couldn’t immediately follow her into the warm room with a camera
that was solidly frozen.
The cold, however, was a challenge Bristow took in stride, which only
reaffirmed her love of the north. Although she’d never been to Alaska in
winter, Bristow’s previous trips to paddle world class whitewater included
starring in a Nissan TV commercial in October 2006.
“It was great — I got to go to Alaska!” Bristow commented. “I hadn’t
been there in the fall or winter. When we got there, the waterfall they wanted
me to drop was frozen, so I seal launched off the canyon wall. They were pretty
happy, the shot looked pretty dramatic with snow on the canyons walls.
“But I love going to Alaska for any reason. The proportion of wilderness
to people — there’s a lot of unexplored territory. It’s so raw, the landscape,
the ocean, the way people live. You feel like you’re going back in time the
further north you get.
Dog sledding is one example of
that; people seem to still value the simple, beautiful things in life a lot
more, like their relationship with their animals (dogs) and the beauty of their
surroundings and the natural world, over the newest computer gadget.
”
• • •
It was a trip to Russia in 2003 that started Bristow thinking about
stepping behind the camera. When an uncle who trades with Russian businessmen
was asked to suggest someone to assess rivers in the far northern Chukotka
region for commercial whitewater potential, he recommended “just the right
person.”
Realizing “not everybody gets to go to Russia,” Bristow recorded the
experience she and fellow paddler Dunbar Hardy found. The resulting film,
A
Russian Wave
,
which
captures the alternately hilarious, heart
warming and thought-provoking ups and downs of their journey to remote Siberia
at the invitation of aspiring Russian eco-tourism entrepreneurs, earned awards
at several
film
festivals, including People’s Choice for Short Films at the 2004 Whistler
festival.
The experience, she said, had a learning curve as sharp as dropping her
first 40-foot waterfall.
“I learned you can do a lot with a little bit of footage if you have the
patience,” Bristow said. “I learned that making a film is a tedious and time
consuming process, to create the story and the characters. And I learned it’s a
challenge to sit in front of the computer for long periods of time.”
For
A Russian Wave
, Bristow edited eight hours of footage to produce a 27-minute film.
For
Dog Gone Addiction
, she had 62 hours of footage. Editing the film took 14 months.
Part of that time was spent living in Pemberton, paddling the Callaghan,
Ashlu and Cayoosh Rivers, the rest sitting in front of her monitor. To help her
complete the project, she received a Banff Centre grant — prior to finishing
A
Russian Wave
she
also participated in a Banff Centre filmmakers’ workshop.
“It’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Bristow said.
“The story was there, it was a matter of how to tell it with what I had — and
how to ditch 61 hours of footage that wasn’t the best shot, and didn’t tell the
story the best way. I stuck a lot of it in the special footage, things I still
thought were important. Mostly, I was trying to learn patience, and realizing
it’s not a quick process. But I like how it turned out — I’ve gotten e-mails from
people who say they love it. The community does seem to appreciate that the
story is told from their perspective.”
Telling the story from the mushers’ perspective was especially important
to Bristow, who felt that was missing from her own appearances in kayaking
films.
“It was just all about the images, about what I was doing in my kayak,”
Bristow said. “They didn’t talk to us as athletes. I think I was inspired to
make a film that did. My whole goal was to tell the story from their
perspective.”
Capturing the perspective of a musher who happened to be a mother was
something Bristow also felt was important.
“I think a lot of women forget about their passions and their dreams and
goals for themselves when they have kids,” Bristow said. “I like the way
Michelle shares her passion with her son, and gets him excited about her
wanting to be in the race, and wanting to win. She’s showing him you can still
commit to yourself and your own goals and be a mom at the same time.”
For Griffin, the film simply succeeded in capturing the nuances of the north and the mushing culture.
“I think it does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the Yukon Quest, and shows how different each musher's story and motivation are from another,” Griffin said. “The humour of the sport and race is right on target, as is the respect and awe that mushers have of their dogs. I also like that she didn't put a feminist stamp on it. Becky simply films three women mushing dogs in an unforgiving and fantastic part of the world and touches on their stories, and I think the common thread of all of us is that we are living our lives and dreams and hopefully we can pass on inspiration to others.”
Bristow will appear in person to introduce Dog Gone Addiction at the Millennium Place theatre on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 3 p.m.
To see more, check out www.wildsoulcreations.com