Films, Music, and Friends: The Trail Running Film Fest
Suddenly, you’re thrown into the wild, and you’ve taken yourself trail running for the first time. You can only marvel at the scenery before you: the snowy mountains and the desert ridges and the rain and all those single-track trails resting on the earth’s floor in balletic formation. Moreover, these are not the landscapes that have sidewalks and hoards of people that usually plod their way in small tourist groups but what might be described as their soft spoken, commanding cousins.
Where are you, really? In a theater on Mercer Avenue, a road lined with construction that has vanishing views of the Space Needle and never thought of as a wilderness escape. Yet somehow you have been transported into an ever changing, undiscriminating refuge full of vibrant struggling, motivating defeats, and miles of victory. And even the long-standing uniquely designed Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, built for the World’s Fair of 1962, fades away from the journeys within it.
Such is the preternatural visual pilgrimage wrought by the films selected for the 2014 “Trail Running Film Fest” presented by Rainshadow Running. The company, led by James Varner, is generating a cult-like following from the rapidly growing trail running community in the Pacific-Northwest. Varner doesn’t use a template for his Rainshadow Running projects, and he openly admits he flies by the seat of his pants most of the time.
It’s the atmosphere of the festival that is melodically intoxicating. Just like Rainshadow Running trail races, the film fest is more of a celebration than a strictly focused film critique. The festival’s first go around includes an all evening concert by The Pine Hearts, an original cascade mountain music band, that plays at most Rainshadow Running events. The premier even featured the Seattle Biscuit Company, a food truck service that makes their biscuits by hand using local ingredients and their Southern roots to provide eaters with a unique biscuit experience.
And not to be out done, the Washington beer loving trail running community proved their worth to the catering service by drinking almost all the beer. At one point someone said, “Yeah, they ran out of beer. They’re down to only Stella.” The catering service was reportedly heard saying, “We had no idea it was going to be that heavy of a beer drinking event.”
The festival is an all-ages event, and will leave you yearning to lace up your sneakers and hit the dirt. Derek McSwain, a self-proclaimed non-runner and mandolin player touring with The Pine Hearts during the film fest, said, “By no means am I a runner, but it was really motivating watching these people doing crazy things.”
For more information about “The Trail Running Film Festival” and the 2014 Northwest Tour check out: www.trailfilmfest.com. To hear some original cascade mountain music check out: www.thepinehearts.com. To start your own trail running adventure: check out.
