Travis Pastrana Moto - Travis Pastrana

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Thrillbillies Filming Flashback: The Forgotten Lake!

Photos (otherwise photo credited below) & Entry By Jolene Van Vugt, AKA "Nitro Girl"

Some of our craziest footage has come out of a small place with large potental to hurt yourself and/or go big, from a bright little idea to take the crew on a small vacation last year after the canyon to relax and wind down. So lets revisit that first trip in which it all started to what looks like our yearly "relaxing" trip to Forgotten Lake!

So as kinda a treat to relax, unwind, have some fun and celebrate the fact that we were all still in one piece and walking after the Grand Canyon, although TP's walk was kind slow and crooked! The Godfrey Crew took us all on a three day house boat trip to the Forgotten Lake. Unwind we did, have fun definitely and celebrate no problem, but as for the relaxing, you know the NC crew, we managed to conger up idea after idea of different stunts we could do or dare others to do. Being equipped with parachutes made this one a no brainer for TP, what can we jump off of and how creative can we get with that. We had all the tools to get up to just about anything we wanted in the water, from a wakeborad boat, to a cigartte boat, jet ski's, parachutes and of coruse our selves.

One stunt that could have gone so extremely wrong and bad for the ginny pig was Jim's famous parachute off the back of a cigarette boat while it's going 70 miles an hour, to make reference to Thrillbillies this is the section where Jim has "HELP ME!" written on this forehead courtesy of Travis (I seriously can't stop laughing even as I'm writing now a year later!) But for some reason we thought this would work, now Jim need a little bit of cokesing for this one as everyone but him thought it would work, but Jim being the trooper he is, he still did it. I think Jim still has traces of whiplash that flare up now and again from the out come of this. But what was to take place was for Jim to stand on the back of the boat and then throw the parachute he was holding in his hand up into the air, then the wind would catch it and take Jim up and off the back of the boat into the air and the would just float back down into the water under canopy. Only problem was Jim was a little worried about the sudden jolt that would come when the chute filled with air so he lend back and a little too early let him self drop off the platform and into the water. In the video you really don't get the just of how hard he hit the water. So into the wake he goes and then picture this, the parachute opening and catching under water, it stopped him dead, snapping him like a whip. So after this Jim decided he was then actually really going to rest for the rest of the trip!

Crum went off the hook with his enteraining and oh so persuavise dance moves charming and wow the whole boat with this unique and gut renching moves, he took it from the boat up on the the rocks and clear up one of the cliffs. As his finale he then jumped as high as he could up into the air, busted out full ninja frog styles and then droppped into the water at a pretty high speed. No body really noticed how high he was until he jumped and it was a long plumit down, we figured after the fact that he had to have jumped from about 90 feet! Lets just say he wasn't feeling so hot when he climbed back up on to the boat. I actually got the sweetest shot of this as he jumped, Travis said it looked like front cover material and it was just darn funny. But here comes the bummer on my part, I managed to delete it along with almost 200 other pictures I had taken that day, sorry! I am so mad I deleted it!

Then Travis had a really big urge to ride a BMX off one of the cliffs, he wanted to stay on it all the way down and land in the water. Rubberneck rigged it up so that Travis would ride off and he would deploy TP's shoot for him, that way he was able to ride the bike down into the water 200 feet below. Travis and Rubberneck also did a few other base jumps variations into the wet, refreshing water land pad. And we were there to swoop them up and head back to the boat to dry off the canopy's and concoct new ideas. Good thing it takes a long time to dry out a canopy before it can be packed and used again!

Of course what trip would be complete without a slip n' slide and since we were near water it just plan made sense! It was a long straight go with a kicker at the bottom to give you a good heave into the water. The ride down wasn't too crazy but if you got off the tarp you were sliding on rock that was like sliding on sand paper and oh did that leave a few marks on people as the tarp didn't exactly stay in place, not too many places to secure a tarp on rock! I think I lost the first few layers on my left thigh from a whole that opened on it.

So it came down to our last morning before we headed back to the Marina and TP had one more up his sleeve. Travis saw this last and final stunt of the trip on a video and wanted to do it ever since. You without a chute piggy back jump onto another that has a rig on and hold on for dear life, the canopy is in their hand and to be thrown out and deployed as you jump off the cliff. Now the person jumping on has to time it just right with the guy jumping or it could go seriously wrong, as usual! They call it the McConkey, or at least TP does. So we get up at 6 am and head out to the perfect cliff that Rubberneck had found the day before. When TP told me about the stunt and we were discussing it, I thought it was pretty cool and wanted to do it, I volunteered for this one and Travis seriously considered letting me do it for about… are you kidding me he wanted to do it so bad he wouldn't even rock, paper, scissors me for it! We were about to, to see who got to do the stunt and he said "No, I wanna do it, your out." And since it was a one time stunt I was out. So Rubberneck and Travis made their way up the 200 foot cliff to do my stunt! lol Anyway, They get up tp the top and Rubberneck explains to TP how he exactly how he needs to get this done, as he does a special pack job for the release of the canopy. This is where the famous lines are echoed across the lake, "Panic, die. Don't panic, live!" They nail the take off and the chute opens and is good. But Travis also wanted to drop off Erik at about 80 feet, well he miscalculated that one and dropped a little too soon and a little crooked slapping down directly on his rear end, getting a wild spanking from the clam waters. The stunt went off well and the guys were pretty pumped as they got back on to the boat.

That was the end of the trip and we got up to more mischief in three days than we were planing on, but it was a great time and we got some great footage. We headed back there his year and pushed it even farther, jam packing 4 days full of stunts and we brought along a lot more ginny pigs!

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