Rollins Pass: Past & Present Documentary
Rollins Pass: Past and Present (a 30-minute documentary, 2022) by B. Travis Wright, MPS and Kate Wright, MBA
A behind-the-scenes look at our 2022 book
Rollins Pass holds 12,000 years of history; Paleoindians utilized the pass 65 centuries before the invention of the wheel. Later, wagon and rail magnates saw the pass as a “Great Gate” across the Continental Divide. Today, the area is listed as one of Colorado’s Most Endangered Places. B. Travis Wright, MPS, is a 2022 Colorado Preservation Inc. State Honor Award recipient for his advocacy of Rollins Pass. As historians and photographers, B. Travis Wright and Kate Wright, MBA, document the timeless landscapes atop Rollins Pass.
In this 3:46 segment of our 30-minute documentary, “Rollins Pass: Past and Present,” we detail our process of restoring original images. This segment discusses the construction photographs of Charles Crocker’s collection, provided by the Tyler Family, showcasing Needle’s Eye Tunnel, the Devil’s Slide Trestle, and the Riflesight Notch Trestle on Rollins Pass (Corona Pass):
To screen this documentary at an event in Colorado, please contact us.
Each of our books, presentations, and documentaries about Rollins Pass involve tens of thousands of hours of work in consultation with experts across the country.
For more video content, check out our Preserve Rollins Pass Video Library.
ON WHY WE CHOOSE NOT TO SHARE CORE PRESENTATION MATERIALS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
We sometimes receive inquiries about whether we can provide a copy of our slide deck via email, external hard drive, hard copy, or by an online link. Due to the extensive investment of time, effort, cost, and resources involved in creating our presentations, we have established a policy of not sharing these core materials and source files. The following points outline the key reasons for this decision:
Significant Investment: Creating and crafting our presentations has entailed tens of thousands of hours of meticulous work. This includes comprehensive research, the integration of high-quality images and videos spanning both historic and modern eras, and the development of custom and graphically-intensive content. Additionally, we have conducted extensive fieldwork to capture unique footage and engage in research as well as volunteer initiatives; our efforts directly contribute essential data to our presentations. For well over the past decade, we have continuously refined our presentations to ensure the highest quality and the incorporation of the most up-to-date information, coupled with new discoveries and streamlined historical research.
Complex Animations: Many individual slides contain up to six dozen layered animations, crucial for delivering dynamic, captivating content, and to aid the audience’s understanding of complex and conjoined timeframes and ideas. As a result, these intricate animations are tailored for live viewing and do not translate effectively to sharing or printing, often appearing overlapped and illegible when printed.
Slide Volume, File Size, and Technical Requirements: The master deck encompasses approximately 2,500 slides, with a variable core file size ranging from 30-40 GB in Apple Keynote format (file size varies due to new content under development and existing content undergoing revision). This extensive volume of proprietary content and large file size exacerbates the complexity of sharing logistics, notwithstanding the near-certainty of performance and readability issues on standard systems. The presentation is also not compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint. In fact, our presentation demands state-of-the-art hardware, specifically a Mac system powered by Apple silicon M-series Max or Ultra processors. Minimum specifications include a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, two ProRes encode/decode engines, 128 GB of memory with a memory bandwidth of 400GB/s to ensure optimal functionality for building, preparing, and presenting our slide deck. These systems guarantee peak performance, minimal latency, and flawless delivery.
While the complete slide deck remains proprietary, we may entertain reasonable, individual requests from specific groups or agencies necessitating particular images or screenshots. Such requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Of course, a sampling of our delivered presentations remain available to the world on YouTube. We extend our gratitude for your understanding and respect for the significant effort and resources invested in the development of our presentations. Upholding their integrity and exclusive use, as our intellectual property, is paramount to us and to our efforts to protect, preserve, and restore the area for future generations.
The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.
