A feature-length documentary
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North American Journey (1986) — 25,000 miles, nine months, one VHS camera In 1986, Mark Schulze and Patty Mooney loaded a car and drove 25,000 miles through the United States, Canada, and Alaska. Nine months on the road, shot entirely on a VHS camera — a rare thing to own back then — with no plan beyond seeing what was out there. They weren’t married yet.
They came home, married in the Cleveland National Forest in 1987, and have been making films together ever since. The trip took them through Yosemite, the Trinity Alps, Crater Lake, Expo ’86 in Vancouver, the signpost forest at Watson Lake, down the Yukon River by raft, into Dawson City and Fairbanks, and up to Denali — where they spent a night alongside a caribou.
There were balloons over Fairbanks, the Eskimo Olympics, a young grizzly at the door, and a flight over Haines. It also contains an origin story neither of them saw coming. In British Columbia, a friend pointed out a mountain biking trail. In a sporting goods shop in Whitehorse, they spotted a neon-colored mountain bike in the window.
That was the beginning of a forty-year obsession that produced The Great Mountain Biking Video, Full Cycle: A World Odyssey, and a career documenting a sport that barely existed yet. The footage has the warmth of the format it was shot on — the cars, the diners, the light. It’s a time machine.
North American Journey won Best Feature Documentary at the London Film Awards and the New York Film Awards.
🎵 The original soundtrack by Candace Love — 33 tracks written from the journey — is on Bandcamp.
Archival Context
- Filmed during a nine-month overland journey in 1986
- Shot across the United States and Canada
- Produced during the VHS era of independent documentary filmmaking
- Preserved and restored from original source materials
Why It Matters
In 1986 you couldn’t look up what was around the next bend. You drove until you found out. There was no way to call ahead, no way to know whether the road held, and no way to see the footage until you got home.
That’s what makes this a record rather than a travelogue. Nine months, 25,000 miles, and a camera running on a format nobody expected anyone to keep. The cars in the parking lots, the diners, the light on the Yukon — none of it was being preserved on purpose. It was just what was there.
Forty years later it turns out that’s the valuable part.n doing so, it preserves a way of traveling that has largely disappeared, offering a record of curiosity, endurance, and self-reliance at continental scale.
Credits
Produced by: Crystal Pyramid Productions®
Distributed by: New & Unique Videos®