I left my GoPro at the top of the mountain.
How a thousand-dollar camera became someone else's souvenir, and what I'm doing about it.
I left my GoPro at the top of the mountain. Not at the trailhead, not in the car, not in a side pocket of a pack — at the actual top, on the actual cairn, after the actual summit photo.
It's the kind of mistake that only feels obvious in retrospect. On the way up the camera is the thing you reach for. On the way down the camera is the thing you forget you set down while you took your gloves off.
I noticed about an hour into the descent. The mental math was fast and ugly: re-summit (no), turn around at dusk (no), accept that a small black box now belongs to whoever wakes up early enough tomorrow to find it (yes).
What's actually on the camera
The card has a couple of decent clips — a long traverse through scree, a wind-blasted ridge shot, the summit pan. If anyone reads this and finds a black GoPro on a cairn somewhere west of where you'd expect: I'd love it back. There's an SD card in it with my email on the splash.
Why this is the first post
Everything else on this site is infrastructure: the package mirror, the cost optimizer, the operations stats. It's all very clean and very tested and not the kind of thing you write a story about. Leaving a camera on a mountain is the kind of thing you write a story about. So this is the first post.
Photos below — uploaded via the admin panel, served from
/var/uploads/images/blog/
through the same nginx host that's rendering this page.