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COYOTES, continued from page 26
Paddle was born out of a love for outdoor
recreation, and remains a hobby
for now. The YouTube channel began
when Fantone obtained a license allowing
him to fly a drone in 2018, which
he has subsequently renewed twice.
He posted his first YouTube video in
February of 2019.
One of the very first things Fantone
did with the drone, he says, was fly
above the site of the Lynnfield/Wakefield
rail trail, which at the time had
not been approved by Town Meeting,
to give residents a sense of the entire
site.
“With a drone, I can get up over the
grass and take a picture of the whole
thing and show people how nice it's
going to be once we finally get that
finished,” he says. “That was one of the
first things I used the drone for.”
The majority of the videos Fantone
posts are those that show the viewer
what they might encounter while
walking along a trail in the area. He
explains that he sets out with a camera
and records himself as he walks along
the trail, before speeding the video up
and posting it to YouTube.
“I like to go walk where people can
walk and video what it is like to walk
there,” he says. “I try to document
the walk and that includes video and
pictures of each location. The video is
not the most cinematic video, usually
it's me just walking down the trail but
I wanted to capture what it's like to
actually walk down the trail. That was
the best way to illustrate that.”
The videos have evolved as Fantone
has finetuned his style. Each trail
video now features music underneath
the footage of the walk, as well as
still photos interspersed to point out
interesting or notable landmarks, and
captions pop up every so often to tell
the viewer something he hopes will be
“informative.”
Fantone’s fascination with the outdoors
dates back as far as his childhood,
where school teachers would
often find that he had wandered off
into the woods.
“I've always liked to be outdoors. I've
always liked to get out on the water
or go for a walk,” he says. “This really
helped me capture my hobby, and do
something productive with it.”
And productive it has been.
Since the channel launched, Fantone
has posted more than 70 videos, racked
up more than 350 subscribers, and garnered
nearly 58,000 views. He says the
channel doesn’t make him any money,
and is simply a labor of love.
Some of Fantone’s most popular recent
videos are those documenting the
wildlife in the area. He explains that
he does so by setting up trail cameras
in a particular area — be it Reedy
Meadow, the Lynnfield Woodlot, or
the Ipswich River — and then simply
waiting for wildlife to pass by. Fantone
himself doesn’t stake out the wildlife,
which often appears in the early hours
of the morning, instead employing
motion-detecting cameras attached to
trees to get snapshots of all sorts of
animals, primarily beavers, coyotes, and
deer.
Steve Fantone, owner of Hike Walk
Paddle, places a trail camera in
Reedy Meadow Conservation Area
with the hopes of getting videos of
wildlife.
He said he scopes out trees with evidence
of beaver activity, like those that
have been gnawed on.
“I set them up in various locations in
the woods and I leave them out for four
to seven days and then I go back and I
collect them and I see what they've got
on them,” Fantone explains.
Fantone says he has no plans to slow
down Hike Walk Paddle.
“I plan to visit more location, I plan
to make better videos of older videos,
new versions, and I plan to try new formats
like the 360 virtual reality videos,”
he says. "That's what's on the horizon
for me. I really like the wildlife trail
camera videos. But I'm trying to keep
a healthy mix of all the different videos.
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"I enjoy making all of them."