About Uphill Productions
Uphill Productions wants to help bring the experiences of outdoor sports here in the United States to a larger audience with modern tools. We help to educate and engage athletes, teams, events, and the public about different sports and the social, environmental, and monetary practices necessary to sustain them in a media driven economy.
Whether through videography, social media packages, fully produced video segments, or consulting on the new media landscape, Uphill Productions provides a well educated and experinced resource to stakeholders. We want to combine the ethics and responsibility of journalism with the creativity, distribution, and demands of modern media to support outdoor sports athletes, teams, and events.
About the Owner
John is a journalist based out of Washington, D.C. and an avid rock climber, mountaineer, and endurance athlete. After he earned a bachelor's in Philosophy from West Point in 2013, he spent eight years in the U.S. Army as an artillery officer. Since leaving the Army, John finished a Masters in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University and spent time as an investigative producer and host on a national broadcast television news show.
Much of his personal time is spent in the mountains and climbing crags, or just working around the house. He climbed his first "5.12" climbing route in Smith Rock, Oregon, the birthplace of American sport climbing. He's replaced his own front door and used the old one to build a desk. He lived out of a rented hatchback nearly a month in Red Rocks Canyon, Nevada, then finished up the trip with a shower at a casino hotel in Las Vegas.
After experiences like these John questioned what he should be doing with his time. Whether it was Mount Rainier in Washington, Shelf Road in Colorado, or the impressive nature of Rocky Mountain National Park, every time he was outside he wanted to share that experience with others. Journalism seemed like the perfect opportunity to make sharing that time outdoors his full-time job. Those personal adventures in beautiful outdoor spaces pushed him to focus on stories about the outdoor sports communities with the broader public, but that's not what he found in national news and mainstream media.
Spending so much time away from travelling, and being a bit of a research junkie, John considers himself an gear connoisseur, backcountry sous chef, erudite hippy, and a recovering beer snob. As he tries to keep up with the elite athletes, he's always finding more to learn about human fitness and its limits.