A Summer of Wandering in My SCARPAs
I continually question whether I visit these places to take photographs or to be present, and this summer I wasn’t able to decide between the two.
On three occasions I got three quite different responses, and I'm still not certain that the question has a single answer: a peaceful lake, a backcountry hut, and then a valley full of runners and cowbells.
Our first destination was a pair of alpine lakes that I visit every summer, the two of them differing in colour a little, with a campsite tucked away in the trees off the main trail.
That pull I keep circling back to, whether I'm there to shoot it or be in it, showed up here the way it does most places I go. There's a particular kind of self-awareness when the light turns, and everyone else wants to sit in it while I circle for an angle. But I always find that sunrise is different. Fewer people are up, so there's more room to just create.
The Spin Ultra 2 was comfortable straight out of the box, with no break-in period standing between me and the ground. The 4mm drop, 28 down to 24, kept me close enough to feel every root and loose rock without ever losing grip, which matters when you're moving fast to catch a shot or scrambling somewhere the trail doesn't technically go.
The second stop was a backcountry hut, a longer approach this time, six or seven kilometres and a thousand metres of climbing, up through an old burn thick with berries, then open meadows before the final push to the cabin, tucked into a basin with its own small lake behind it.
The familiar pull showed up again here too, usually right when the light turned, and everyone settled in for the evening. I started finding ways to catch it without leaving the moment, camera up for a few seconds, then back down. Photographing people I didn't know as well added a bit of hesitation of its own, even when nobody minded.
One day we went out for a little scramble above camp, and the Spin Ultra 2 surprised me. I never once felt unsteady on the technical terrain, even though this clearly isn't what the shoe was built for. It's designed for distance, not scrambling, which made the confidence it gave me on that rock even more unexpected.
The last stop, and arguably the best one: Chamonix. I wasn't shooting for any brands that week, but the friends I was travelling with were, and between watching them work and the size of UTMB itself, race day energy, social activations, the whole valley felt like it was moving faster than usual.
The pull showed up differently here, less about my own camera and more about noticing it in everyone around me. But something had shifted by this point in the summer. It felt less like something to fight and more like just part of the job. Once the race finished and the crowds thinned out, we stayed to camp for a few extra days, and the valley slowed right down with us. For the first time all summer, the pull wasn't showing up at all.
By Chamonix, the Spin Ultra 2 had already carried me across quiet trails, a long approach, and a scramble it wasn't built for. Here, on terrain that shifted between rock, dirt, and packed trail within a single day, they held up the same way. Even with the ground constantly changing underfoot, rock one stretch, dirt the next, I never noticed the shoe adjusting, which might be the whole point.
I don't think my question ever really gets answered, and I've stopped expecting it to. Somewhere across these three trips I stopped seeing the pull as something to solve and started seeing it as just part of how I document a life spent outside. Maybe that's the whole answer. Not choosing one or the other, but letting the wanting of both be part of the story.