National Geographic

This image of sand boarding in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi, while originally photographed as part of a project for Strawberry Frog, was just picked up by National Geographic. How wonderful. I’ll try not to let it go to my head though, as, as the Japanese say, even monkeys can fall from trees. In other words, stay humble, Christopher, stay humble. The copy (which I wrote) reads: Anyone who thinks that sand boarding is like snowboarding is delusional. Sand boarding is nothing like snowboarding. You can’t turn on sand. You can’t stop on sand. You can’t do anything on sand except go straight down and crash. That’s it. Period. And man, does it hurt when you crash, as, unlike snow, sand is basically cement only a tad softer. So you can imagine how our poor talent, Gleb Osipov, must have felt after a day of hurling himself off of these giant sand dunes in the middle of the Rub’ al Khali desert. I swear I heard bones breaking a few times. But Gleb just bounced up after every wipeout, dusted himself off, climbed up the dune and did it all again. He was a real trooper. Insane, but a trooper nonetheless.