The Times and Travels of Nolan
Documenting trips I've taken and places I've seen.
I’m a homeowner now. That’s so weird to say! Next week, I’ll be a lead forecaster (temporarily) at NWS Fairbanks, Alaska. That’s so weird to say! Life can sometimes throw curveballs at you. I never imagined that Elizabeth and I would be buying a house in 2024. Heck, I can remember sitting in our bedroom …
Continue reading “Life Update: New House, New Opportunities”
A sunny afternoon, an open interstate, and an official NPS unit in the GPS. There aren’t many better ways that Elizabeth and I could draw up a Sunday afternoon. On February 4, 2024, we were just in the process of finishing up our weekend getaway to Arizona by driving back from Sedona to Phoenix. Just …
Continue reading “Arizona 2024: Montezuma Castle National Monument”
This summer, I’ve gotten really into watching people thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. There’s a lot of interesting tics and behaviors that the thru-hiking community does. Some of it elicits that typical reflexive human scorn when you’re watching it – “Oh, no way I’d do _____ if I was out there hiking!” One of those …
Golden sunlight poured down on the streets of downtown Sedona. The sun was dropping rapidly as it tends to do in early February, and Elizabeth and I were still just a little bit drunk. I hope that when I look back on this blog 40 years from now, I can still remember the bliss of …
Before I jump into it: this post covers my trip to my twenty-first American national park. That’s insane to me. When Elizabeth and I first conceived of our trip to Guadalupe and Carlsbad 6 summers ago, I’d been to 9 of them with my family. Even as recently as the middle of 2020, my count …
Continue reading “Colorado 2024: Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park”
In some of my previous blog posts highlighting Elizabeth and my honeymoon adventures, I wrote about the cool things we did on the island. Snorkeling in a tectonic rift, walking through an ice cave, climbing a glacier, bathing at Blue Lagoon – all of those things have something in common. They’re all active. There was …
What do you do when you’ve already accomplished an amazing weekend? It’s a good question to have to ask, a good problem to have. And it’s what faced Elizabeth and myself in Provo on November 19, 2023. We’d already been to Mount Timpanogos. We’d already hiked the Y Trail. We’d seen BYU’s campus and witnessed …
On April 8, 2024, Elizabeth and I fulfilled one of our great life’s goals: to see a total solar eclipse. It was moving on a deep spiritual level; you can read all about it here. In that post, I mused a bit about how we’re approaching a point in our lives where we’re starting to …
There was a little bit of construction on the sidewalk, so I had to step into the road to get where I was going. It wouldn’t do to have to go the bathroom once the event had actually gotten underway. The sun shone down from a clear blue sky on the Ozark foothills, on the …
Elizabeth’s big Christmas present was off to a pretty great start. In the first 36 hours we’d driven through a beautiful mountain section of Arizona, visited a national park, and had an awesome, moody low-light sunset in Sedona. But, in my considered opinion, nothing prepared me to wake up on a sunny morning in Sedona …
