Elizabeth’s Christmas present really couldn’t be off to a better start. We’d been in Arizona for less than 24 hours and had already had a delightful national park visit. There was a little bit of apprehension for us for the rest of our Friday afternoon, since it involved a drive from Holbrook to Sedona, and …
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The 2023 Football Season, Part One: The Leaders and Best
September 1, 2007. One of the first college football games I ever attended with my dad and some of his college buddies. One of them mentioned that the opponent Michigan was facing had won the I-AA national championship last year, so it might take a half for the Wolverines to put them away. Instead, Appalachian …
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Arizona 2024: Petrified Forest National Park
A conundrum, expressed in chart form: There are 63 American national parks. Elizabeth and I want to visit each of them. After a slow ramp up, we really got going in the post-graduation pandemic times when the outdoors was the only escape. And then in August 2021, we made a huge mistake: we got engaged. …
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TORUS 2019: Water in West Texas (May 25, 2019)
Now that TORUS 2019 is 5 (wow) years in the rearview mirror, the memories are getting a little fuzzier. Some of the big days still live on in my memory and always will. May 25, 2019 will always have a historical footnote in the great 2019 tornado outbreak sequence – but that footnote occurred hundreds …
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Utah 2023: The Y
It’s a western thing: writing a letter into a nearby mountainside where it can be seen for miles and miles around. I’ve seen them before (especially in my family’s 2016 trip to southern Utah), but none so large as the Y on the east side of Provo. At 380 feet tall, the Y is longer …
Oregon Coast: Devil’s Churn, Thor’s Well
Ever so slowly, I was acclimating to not being on midnight shifts. It helped immensely that we were on the West Coast a full two hours behind central time, but by Sunday, October 15 I actually felt sort of human. A long night of sawing logs (you’d have to be crazy not to be exhausted …
Year In Review: 2023
Not much happened over the past year, to be honest. I traveled to Washington, Colorado, Missouri, California, Wyoming, Colorado again, Iceland, Delaware, Michigan, Oregon, Utah, and Pennsylvania. I completed milestones in my first full year of my job – completing New Hire, RAC, issued my first severe thunderstorm warnings, worked through my first tornado outbreaks, …
Utah 2023: Timpanogos
Grey light filtered into the bedroom. For someone who spends as many nights as I do in different beds than my own, it was still a jolt to look around and try to remember where I was. After a moment, it flooded back: I was in an AirBNB in Provo, Utah, and today was my …
Glacier National Park: The Grinnell Glacier Trail
The quintessential Glacier National Park experience: driving up the long valley of Lake Sherburne on a beautiful, perfectly clear July morning. Pulling over along the way to spot bears in the distance. Driving into a beautiful, craggy mountains with snow shining on their flanks. And then embarking on foot on a journey that takes you …
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Oregon Coast: Drift Creek Falls
(This is part two of the post series covering our October 14 along the Oregon coast. Previously, I wrote about our drive up the Oregon Coast Highway from Newport to Pacific City). It had already been an incredible day by any measure. Volcanic beaches, seals, lighthouses, whales, arches, rocks, big waves, tiny rivers, and beer: …
