Foto principal de la recaudación de fondos

WALK A GIANT STAIRCASE, FINISH FILM, STEP 2

Maureen Kowsky es la persona que organiza esta recaudación de fondos.

Donación protegida

WELCOME TO WALK A GIANT STAIRCASE, FINISH FILM, STEP 2!

Thanks to all our generous supporters, we surpassed our goal of $17,000 for digitizing “Walk A Giant Staircase.” This completes our first campaign, STEP 1, Finish Film.

Now we are launching a new campaign called STEP 2, Edit Film. Editing is the heart of completing our film about the wonders of Jug Handle. It’s where we will weave together the newly-digitized images and sounds to bring the story of the staircase and the people who saved it to the “silver screen” at last!

If you are a newcomer to our site, please enjoy the fascinating story of the staircase, the first “Jug Handlers,” and the making of our film. If you are a return visitor, you may want to scroll to the end to read more about our editing process, new crew members, plus costs and our new fundraising strategies.

Onward!

THE STORY: Forty-five years ago, on the northern coast of California near the town of Mendocino, Maureen shot a 16mm color film about a unique natural area: The Jug Handle Ecological Staircase. To climb the staircase is to travel back in time 500,000 years from the current stair step forming in the tide pools, across a grassy headland, through a pine/fir forest, into a redwood forest and then to step out of the tallest trees in the world into a pygmy forest. There, on the oldest stair step, one-hundred-year-old trees barely two feet high are growing in some of the oldest soils on the planet! Jug Handle Creek then carries particles of these soils down to the shore where the sea is carving the next step from the headland.

But climbing the staircase is not just a trip into the past. The staircase is an amazingly diverse succession of plant and animal communities evolving together in the wind, rain, fog, sun and soil of the Mendocino coast. Dr. Hans Jenny, the eminent soil scientist at UC Berkeley who first brought the staircase to the public's attention, called it "a living museum." He also said, "There is nothing else like it in the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Maureen shot the film through all the seasons: the rain and wind of fall and winter, the wildflowers of spring, and summer’s sunlit grasses and fog in the redwoods. She intended for audiences to experience the beauty and uniqueness of each stair step. And, perhaps, feel a sense of the time involved in creating the staircase.

The film is also about the group of people who came together to save the land from being developed. Once Dr. Jenny sounded the call, inspired and led by the naturalist, John Olmsted, teachers and small business owners mainly from the San Francisco Bay Area visited Jug Handle. They fell in love with the land and began the process of saving it from immediate and future development. That process included standing in front of bulldozers with injunction papers and years of fundraising to pay off the mortgages once they purchased the land.

They were successful! Thanks to them, the staircase north of Jug Handle Creek is saved as a state reserve - the only completely intact pygmy forest staircase left on the coast.

The land south of the creek with its 145-year-old farmhouse continues to grow into the nature education center these early stewards envisioned.

In the late 1970’s as Maureen was editing the film, her life took a sudden, unexpected turn. She contracted a chronic and, at times, critical illness. The intervening years have been spent regaining her health. Now, at last, at age 70, she is beginning the process of finishing the film. The original crew, caretakers and naturalists in the film and people long involved with Jug Handle are all on board.

Finishing this film matters. For half a million years at Jug Handle plants, animals, and the elements have been creating a living laboratory of how life works. The staircase is a model of the intricate, ingenious relationships among plants, animals and elements that sustain life on earth and allow it to thrive. All these relationships are elegantly laid out along the staircase and available for visitors to learn from and marvel at.

Jug Handle's early stewards were well aware of being "stewards in training." Becoming caretakers of this land was not in any of their life plans! And there was no training manual. So they went about the often hard work with a good deal of humor and humility. Yet underlying every decision about paying off the mortgages, repairing the farmhouse, or growing into a nature education center was their commitment to a healthy relationship with the land. They envisioned future generations discovering that relationship for themselves.

This film about how life works and people discovering their individual and collective relationships with the land they loved is timeless. Now, when discovering both of these seems vital to sustaining life on our blue-green planet, Walk A Giant Staircase will be especially inspiring and informative.

STEP 2: Editing is the exciting, multifaceted work of viewing and organizing all the images – film, stills, graphics – and listening to and organizing the soundtracks – sync, ambient, narration, voice over, music – then putting them together to tell the story of the staircase and early Jug Handlers clearly and beautifully. To ensure the highest quality, we will employ and collaborate with a professional editor with a particular interest in our film and similarly interested sound technicians. Because editing is such a detailed, time-intensive process, the cost for Step 2 will be $40,000.

GOOD NEWS ABOUT EDITING COSTS: Because we surpassed our goal for digitizing the negative and came in a little under budget as well, we already have a few thousand dollars to begin STEP 2. Editing is done in stages with short breaks in between to review the work, so we do not need to raise all the funds before beginning. As we progress, we will have edited scenes to show!

Please note that we have a fundraising site at the Center for Independent Documentary (CID) where we can receive donations from individuals, life-affirming businesses, and organizations that require a tax deduction. CID can receive grants for us, as well. The CID link, https://www.documentaries.org/walk-a-giant-staircase, appears at the end of every update.

HOW YOU CAN HELP: Please continue to donate as you can and spread the word. Let us know of any organizations and businesses that would enjoy becoming part of our support team by clicking the Contact button below. We will be in touch with them.

Jug Handle has always been about community, the natural community along the staircase and the human community cherishing it. The same is true of our film. So let’s expand our community. Let’s help “Walk A Giant Staircase” make experiencing wildflowers on the headland and the strangely beautiful pygmy forest possible for all!