Monday, October 12, 2009

The K-7 goes primitive camping and rock crawling with us. Very rugged camera.

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Hi Pentaxian friends.

My Step-son and I went camping and rock crawling this weekend in the Big Bear Lake area of the San Bernardino Mountains. I tested the K-7 against humidity, dust and cold and it did just fine. The pictures below are samples of the weekend. I was too tired to add captions last night but here are some now. I also took some video and once stitched together, I will post the whole video experience here. It was impressive.

Thanks for looking,

Yvon Bourque

We started out from Lucerne valley and drove south to the San Bernardino Mountains.

At Elevation of 4,000 ft, we decided to air-down the tires so that we could get a better grip and it would be needed later on rough roads.

We stopped at the summit of the first mountain to take a few pictures and ...


to change our altitude!

The first part of the trip took us through mostly rocky terrain.

We reached the top of another mountain, About 6,000 ft elevation, where we thought we could set up our base camp. As it turned out, from there we could see a better spot in the distance at about 2,000 ft higher.

We left this rocky area through...

a newly paved road.

From there we drove East to the next mountain that showed as being 8,300 ft elevation on our map.

We finally got to a nice spot, surrounded by boulders and flat. We couldn't go any farther as the rugged road came to an end. The elevation was 7,604 ft and it was very peaceful except for the cry of coyotes in the woods behind.

We set out tents up and relaxed for a while.

The camp all set up, we were hungry.

We carved some meat out of a wild deer we caught...not! We did have some steaks and some Johnson bratwurst and some canned chili.

Looking around for wild game, I saw this enormous chipmunk crossing the trail. It must have weight at least 1 or 2 ounces. I figured that shooting it with a 12 GA shotgun wouldn't leave much meat to eat! I spared the little guy. Actually, I only shoot animals with my cameras. The shotgun we brought was more for safety reasons.

Steaks started grilling.

Steaks ready to eat.

The sun went down and temperature started to drop.

The sky turned out pink and purple and made the scenery ideal for silhouettes.

Donny got a little carried away with the starting fluid!

Now that's better.

There is nothing like watching a John Wayne movie in the wilderness.

A hot fire to warm your feet and the hike-in
movie theater was great.

Morning came and I can still smell the bacon cooking...yum!

We are starting our trip back home via the longest way we could find amongst the various trails.

The roads were not all that friendly, but really fun for driving with a Jeep.

We had to run on the tire sidewalls at times. That's why a good set of off-road is a must when riding on boulders.

It took us more than two hours to drive through this 3 miles long road.

The efforts paid off as we came to a nice water hole...

that even had tons of trouts in it. Next time we will plan to camp there one night, fish for our dinner and take a fresh and very cold bath.

Words of advice: If you camp in an area that goes below the freezing point at night, regular toilet paper does much better than "Cottonnelle wipes" which frozed to a block of ice. :(

The K-7 did great, it got water on it, a lot of dust, shot a around 20 Degrees F, and it got tossed around in the Jeep. This is one tough camera.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't wait to see more pictures and the video! I'm so jealous...

Suecae Sounds said...

I think you really nailed that 17th 18th photo.

Thanks for sharing.

Somanna said...

Nice shots Yvon, esp. the off-roading ones! I thought the Jeep wasn't going to make it though?

And too funny you take a dvd player on a camping trip!

Looking forward to the rest and the video.

Unknown said...

Somanna,

We worked on the Jeep and because I installed a new Carter Carburetor, we couldn't get it to idle properly and the engine was stalling all the time. We decided to take the Jeep after all, and set the idle speed at 1100 RPM. It was a little ackward negociating the rocks at 1100 RPM, but it worked. We had a blast.

Miserere said...

Are you seriously telling me you guys went all the way into the wilderness...to watch a movie!? You Canadians are crazy, man! :-D

I liked the silhouetted trees at dusk with the stars starting to shine through. Seeing that sunset would have made it worthwhile for me.

Unknown said...

Miserere,

Not just any movie...a John Wayne movie :)

We really went primitive camping to get away from work and the City, and to ride the Jeep in rough terrain and over rocks. I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted to because I had so much fun driving the Jeep in such harsh conditions. I did shoot videos and will post them shortly.

Grunf said...

Wow, nice photos.

Looks like K-7 really keeps good detail in shadows. Tell me pls, since i have a K-200D, is K-7 really that much of improvement ?