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 …
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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 …
Arizona 2024: Sedona
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 …
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, …
