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 …
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Arizona 2024: Subway Cave
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 …
Colorado 2024: Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
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 …
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Iceland Honeymoon: Snæfellsnes
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 …
Utah 2023: Antelope Island
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 …
May 10, 2024: The Great Oklahoma Aurora
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 …
Eclipse 2024
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 …
Arizona 2024: Sedona Wine Tour
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 …
Glacier National Park: Grinnell Lake
Blue waters gleaming like a tropical paradise. A warm, sunny day with just a hint of a breeze. Two campers who hadn’t had a proper shower in about 96 hours and several dozen miles of hiking in the interim. You put this all together and it makes sense why Elizabeth wanted to hike down to …
Utah 2023: The OU/BYU Game
Saturday, November 18, 2023 dawned early for me. In fairness, it dawned early for everyone in Provo, because that’s what a 10:00 am local time kickoff does to a person. It took a little time to rouse Elizabeth from bed because she was still so worn out from my birthday the day before. Our AirBNB …
