Sneak Peek of the Week
Sun photographer Hugh Carey is pointing his lens in a new direction.
If you’re a regular reader of The Colorado Sun, you know Hugh Carey’s pictures.
Since he started with The Sun in 2021, he has shot burro racers on Mosquito Pass, a “wild ice” skater in Rocky Mountain National Park, Leadville 100 competitors in crazy beautiful light, and some of the most iconic images related to wolves entering Colorado since they wandered into the state around the time he signed on with us.
His images have won a bunch of accolades, including the 2016 Wyoming Press Association Photographer of the Year and as he says, all blasé, “a zillion Colorado-based awards.” He’s The Sun’s resident badass when it comes to outdoor adventures, doing things like outskiing several volunteer patrollers on a monster tour commemorating the 10th Mountain Division, and scrambling across multiple fourteeners above Alma in Tevas because his arm was in a sling after breaking his collarbone in an international Ultimate competition and he couldn’t tie his hiking shoes. And in a moment that will live on long past his tenure, he showed up to do an overnight shoot at Winter Park Resort last April in a women’s yellow-and-teal one piece ski suit because he forgot the down coat he needed to stay warm in arctic temperatures.
The best thing about that story is that he called zero attention to the outfit. He just shot the hell out of the o’dark thirty shift and moved on to the next assignment.
But here’s something you wouldn’t know about Carey unless you’ve met him face to face. He’s deaf, which makes him the perfect person for his profession.
“Working as a photojournalist was the best skill I can do as deaf individual,” he said. “This position allows me to pay attention and anticipate capturing the storytelling moments with use of visual tools, without the distraction of sounds.”
We’ll miss the crazy mountain man who looks better in a woman’s one piece than most women. But you’ll still see him here now and then. Hugh starts as communications manager for the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind next month, and in his typical up-for-anything style, will still be taking freelance assignments in his new neighborhood around Colorado Springs.
~ Tracy
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Send feedback and tips to jason@coloradosun.com or tracy@coloradosun.com
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The Playground
Bikeboom offers deaf riders community in a three-day festival this weekend near Fruita
Here’s another thing you need to know about Hugh Carey. He’s an advocate for American Sign Language Speakers, specifically in the outdoor realm.
Since 2020, he’s been co-organizing a three-day traveling annual mountain bike festival called Bikeboom that’s committed to overcoming barriers faced by the Deaf community in outdoor recreation.
“The idea of the festival started from our tradition of camping weekends in Moab during the autumn months,” Carey said. “We wanted more deaf riders to experience the joy of riding in the desert with fellow sign language users as a break from daily hustle and bustle as deaf individuals in the hearing world.”
That morphed into a goal to gather at new mountain bike destinations each year to help grow and expose deaf cycling communities to the network and build on their skills. Bentonville, Arkansas hosted the first festival. And this year’s — based out of Camp Eddy RV Park in Grand Junction — starts Friday.
Bikeboom operates on the premise that people with disabilities represent the largest minority group in the world yet they’ve been left behind in the outdoor recreation industry. Deaf individuals have been underserved and underprivileged, sometimes making it difficult to afford a mountain bike or find riding partners who communicate with ASL.
“We as deaf people oftentimes feel excluded from activities and opportunities in the hearing world because of accessibility,” says John Klish, a world champion cyclist, Deaflympian, president of the USA Deaf Cycling Association and Carey’s partner on Bikeboom.
“Deaf accessibility ranges widely for each deaf individual, but most are visual communicators via sign language, lip reading, visual aids such as signs, captioning and technology. Bikeboom is a safe place for the deaf participants to gather and feel the event is specifically for them, because we provide sign language interpreters for the clinic instructors and the event is primarily operated by deaf members.”
This weekend’s event moves outdoor equity for people who are deaf one step closer. Ninety deaf registrants are coming from across the U.S. and several foreign countries.They’ll take to the trails around Grand Junction, make new friends, learn new skills and ride for the same reasons anyone does.
The Guide
TV’s best show celebrates sucking at outdoor sports
13
Paddy O’Connell’s shoe size, the largest La Sportiva climbing shoes can accommodate
Paddy O’Connell has always been one the largest humans on the ski lift, or in the bike park, or in a pair of climbing shoes or a shorty wetsuit. He’s 6 foot 5 and weighs 250 pounds, not sopping wet but sweaty from the effort of squeezing into the suit. And he’s OK with people writing about his appearance.
He’s also willing to take punches to achieve his mission of “telling stories that make people laugh, because it’s not easy being an adult beginner in awesome, very often intense outdoor sports,” he says. To wit: It’s time for season 2 of his OutsideTV show “PaddyO Sucks At…,” during which he tries a bunch of outdoor sports for the first time, gets schooled in pretty much all of them, survives each ordeal with equal parts grit and humor and, he hopes, shows the world “how laughter and stepping into situations that are a little uncomfortable can deflate the fear monster that keeps us from trying new things both in and out of the outdoors.”
It turns out PaddyO sucks at all kinds of sports, which is perfect for the show. He tries bike-packing on a route that starts in Boulder and climbs 10,000 feet over 77 miles as it loops beneath the Indian Peaks. Day one is 30 miles and 6,000 feet of climbing. Up top? “My saddle sores were apocalyptic. Having that be the hardest is also saying something for a guy who is stubborn and has a propensity for doing stupid shit in the outdoors.”
He came most naturally to the wonky brand of ski mountaineering called skimo, because it has skiing, which he learned to do off-camera in Telluride in the mid-aughts after trying it a handful of times earlier. “Folks took me under their wing and blamo! Skiing became my passion,” he said. “Two years later I was hired as a patroller, and the ski life was my life.”
But skimo also had its downside: “I was once again poured into full body outdoorsy pantyhose so that felt decidedly unnatural.”
The show can sometimes border on kitschy, with O’Connell trying a little too hard for a laugh. But what’s cool about his adventures is that it at least feels like he’s trying them for the first time (he swears this is the case, or, if not, that he’s done something once and swore never to do it again before the show came along). And he takes his punches humbly.
Sometimes he even gets deep, like when he discusses his most rewarding sport to date.
“We broke out of the three-day ‘can PaddyO go from zero to hero in 72 hours’ conceit’ when I signed up to do the Grand Traverse run race,” he said. “I trained for five months, running 600 miles, because I didn’t like the sound of turning 40 and I wanted a way to celebrate going into my fourth decade, being 11.5 years into (substance abuse) recovery and that I can still do hard shit.”
In their words
Why were wildlife officials so serene-seeming following the death of a captured wolf?
4 months
Estimated time the first pups born to introduced wolves in Colorado lived untouched in the wild
By now, the only people who haven’t heard about Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s capture of the Copper Creek wolf pack must be on an extended trip in the backcountry without access to media.
The story of CPW trapping and relocating the pack’s two adults and four puppies was the biggest wildlife news of the week, coming out Monday in a series of live meetings and press releases.
Wildlife officials said the alpha male died shortly after the pack was placed in a secure enclosure, somewhere in Colorado. The surviving wolves are getting little contact with humans except for when they’re being fed carnivore logs, carcasses from roadkill and other ungulates instead of the cattle and sheep meat they’d been eating leading up to their capture.
The male wolf had “deep puncture wounds” on a hind leg, which CPW said was unrelated to its capture. The wolf’s weight was down almost 30% from when it was released in December and weighed 104 pounds. And it died despite receiving antibiotics for an infection.
Wildlife officials said it was “unlikely the wolf would have survived for very long in the wild” and that a third-party would conduct necropsy. CPW director Jeff Davis added if the male had survived, it would have been in captivity permanently because of its predation history. That may be why both Davis and CPW’s wolf conservation manager Eric Odell seemed serene when they delivered the news in a live meeting with reporters.
But based on the same rule that would have prevented the male from being released back into the wild, the healthy female could spend the rest of her life behind a fence. And no one knows exactly what will happen to the pups, although CPW says they should be released back into the “northern release oval” of Grand County when they’re big enough to be fitted with adult-size tracking collars.
The wolf program suffered another blow Tuesday when officials confirmed the death of a third released wolf, this one in the wild. CPW hasn’t released the cause of death. There are other unanswered questions. Stick with The Sun for more on this developing story.
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