The Adventure of GoPro

By the end of this article you will know why the Hoover Dam, the West Coast Drought and the Go Pro Hero 3 cross paths. If you just care about the tech skip to the *

On a trip to the west coast my wife and I explored the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam. You MUST see the Grand Canyon to really experience how vast and incredibly large it is. You know that image you have of the Grand Canyon in your mind? Quadruple it, yeah, that is about the right size. Anyway, we went to the Grand Canyon and took some great pictures, learned some interesting facts. Next we went to the Hoover Dam, you could clearly see the effects of west coast drought. See that white area on the mountain, that is the loss of water… standing and looking down over the edge of the Hoover Dam you will gladly admit the drop is a bit too far to fall.

So naturally, our next stop was Lake Mead to see what kind of water sports were available and checkout the beaches. We are from Michigan, our idea of a great time is to go up north on the weekends, swimming, and water skiing. Once in the parking lot it was easy to see that a small walk to the beach had increased to a two football field hike to get to the waters edge! Some of the smaller mountain peaks were completely exposed when they had previously been covered by the water.

Needless to say this gave us quite a bit of previously underwater shoreline to explore. On our way we found some of those 80’s sunglasses completely covered in muscles and several other random artifacts that had fallen off of boats through the years. As we explored more we came across something that was shaped like a camera but its form was hard to make out. The muscles had consumed the entire camera! As I peeled off the muscles like wrapping paper I noticed it was much smaller than I expected! It was a Go Pro Hero 3! The GoPro always looked like an interesting product but never enough to throw down my money. This experience changed my mind.

*Once all of the life forms were scraped off it was submerged again to rinse off some of the dirt. (It was already wet, no harm done) There is no way that this camera would still work, right!? I tore it apart and cleaned the circuit board, pulled out the SD Card, removed the battery and disassembled one piece at a time. Once all of the crud was removed and the camera was dried out I plugged it in just for kicks… It’s going to spark and poof in smoke, or nothing will happen, I mean look at the pictures! The USB port is still caked in gunk. On came the charging LED! Crazy! I let it charge for a day or so, no smoke, that's was good. When turned on that little screen blinked on, it has quite a bit of info! Too bad though, it only stayed on for about 5 seconds… I was too close now, a new battery was ordered! This fixed the problem, the camera works great, except for sound… the Microphones were completely destroyed from its months of submersion.

Enjoy the pictures!