Working DfN, Directly from Nature, in the Himalayas. Hard travel in amazing landscapes May/June 2007 With all of my years of travel in India, and my numerous explorations of remote regions in the Kashmir Himalayas, this year’s expedition was the most extreme, difficult, and artistically rewarding. The Ganges Himalayas was everything I had thought it would be and more. However, the sheer physical effort of our explorations, much of it between 10,000-13,200 feet was at times grueling and exhausting. In the Gangotri region we trekked the 18 km up... and that same 18 km down. And breaking camp and hitting the trail by 7:30-8am and not getting into camp until 3-4pm in the afternoon, left me fairly exhausted. Even when the trails were well marked and time-worn by millions of previous pilgrims, they were often very narrow, precarious, and dangerous. In a thousand places a sprained ankle or a accidental stumble in the wrong portion of the trail could easily prove life-threatening. This expedition was designed to allow me to artistically study, sketch, photograph, video, and paint my way throughout this ancient and sacred region of the Himalayas. But the sheer physical exertion and long days of travel made it very difficult to work in the way I normally do. Because of this I tended to sketch and photograph more than I thought I would. We all shared video duties and came home with over 12-14 hours of raw video; which I am now busy editing down into bite sized segments and loading up onto the website. We had thought we would be able to upload video and photos all along the routes. And in fact, amazingly enough, we discovered a “Cyber Cafe” sign on a building atop the Kedarnath plateau, at more than 12,000! The problem was that editing video, even on the Macintosh laptops that we brought with us is time-consuming. But then finding and then uploading content to the web was not as easy as I had thought. We were able to do it at several places along the routes. But in many instances, we were all simply too tired by the end of the day’s travels to go through the process.