How I Stayed Productive on a Seven Day Solo Alpine Project

Shasta & Lassen

Aug 16

as always, the full gallery is at the bottom, so skip there if you don’t care about the words

Seven days in the mountains with no crew, multiple brand deliverables, and two major peaks to climb sounds like a recipe for chaos. And honestly, some days it was. But looking back at the trip from Mount Lassen to Mount Shasta, what surprised me most was not how hard it was to stay productive. It was how much I was able to accomplish by building small, consistent habits into each day rather than trying to force productivity into a schedule that the mountains would never respect anyway.

Follow Dalton on your favorite platform: @storiesbydalton

The first thing I figured out early was that every day had a different energy budget. Day one was a long drive day. The most productive thing I could do was get behind the wheel, find good podcasts, make my phone calls, and cover ground. Trying to force a big creative output day on a driving day would have been a waste of that specific kind of energy. So I used the drive to think through the project, mentally map out what I wanted to shoot, and arrive at my destination ready for the next phase instead of already depleted.

Scouting days were their own kind of productivity. Day two at Mount Lassen looked unproductive on paper. Foggy conditions, a closed entrance, a long detour to the north side of the park. But every hour of that day was feeding information into the project. Where the light came from. Which entrance worked. What the approach looked like through binoculars. What product shots were possible in overcast conditions. Scouting is not downtime. It is research. The photographers who skip it are the ones who show up on shoot day unprepared.

I also made a habit of doing quick field edits at the end of each shooting session. Not full edits, just a rough pass to see what I had captured, identify what was working, and figure out what gaps I still needed to fill. After the Manzanita Lake shoot on day three I sat in the van and went through the morning's images before heading to the Lassen approach. That fifteen minute review told me the landscape shots were strong but I needed more variety in my product angles. So when I went back out that afternoon I knew exactly what to shoot instead of guessing.

My Favorite Items I Brought On This Trip:

2p Tent Copper Spur by Big Agnes; I’ve had this tent going on 5 years and still love it
Crazy Creek Camp Chair; easy and simple to use
Jetboil Flash; I’ve had mine for almost a decade and still works great
Sony a7r4; my work horse of a camera
Tamron 16-30; probably my favorite lens right now
Peak Design Tripod; a requirement for solo creatives

The commercial work never fully stopped even when I was deep in the mountains. Day five, the rest day before heading into Shasta, was almost entirely spent on behind the scenes admin. Editing images, organizing files, catching up on work that had piled up while I was on the mountain, and picking up the permit I needed for the climb. That kind of day feels boring when you are living it but it is the infrastructure that keeps a solo project from collapsing under its own weight. Rest days are not wasted days. They are the days that make the hard days possible.

The biggest productivity lesson from this trip was learning to match the task to the moment rather than trying to force a rigid schedule onto an inherently unpredictable environment. On a big summit day you are not going to be editing photos or writing captions. You are climbing. On a rest day you are not going to be pushing for your best creative work. You are recovering and handling logistics. Trying to do the wrong thing at the wrong time on a project like this drains you fast and produces mediocre results.

Seven days alone in the mountains with multiple brands counting on you teaches you to be ruthlessly honest about your energy and time. The days I was most productive were the days I stopped trying to do everything and started doing exactly what that specific day called for. Nothing more and nothing less.