About Me
I trace my love for wild places first to Alaska, where I spent my youth following my dad and absorbing his devotion and respect for mountains and glaciers, lakes and rivers, and the wildlife that inhabit them. Our family vacations were spent backpacking and skiing in the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains, canoeing on the Kenai Moose Range, and sailing on Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska. As my appreciation of wild places grew, I even came to share my dad's perverse enthusiasm for the "green hells" of the Chugach, those dense thickets of alder and mountain hemlock that we fought through to gain access to the best of the high country. I did not carry a camera in those days, but my memory is filled with images of jagged peaks and vast icefields, long open ridges and camps by mountain streams, bands of wild Dall sheep and flocks of ptarmigan. I can still hear rock and ice rumble off of the cliffs at the heads of the valleys where we camped. I can still smell chunks of moose sausage cooking over campfires at our lunch stops.
I eventually left Alaska for Oregon to go to college and stayed in the Pacific Northwest, spending several years in British Columbia, and finally settling in Washington State.
Over the subsequent 40 years I have immersed myself in the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest. My passion for "long walks in wild places" has led me deep into the National Parks and wilderness areas of Washington, Oregon, and Canada. My journeys have taken me into some of the most remote corners of the region; the peaks and glaciers of the North Cascades (where I renewed my acquaintance with the "green hells" of my youth) and the icefields of the Canadian Rockies.
On these travels, I have almost always carried a camera, refining my photographic skills on the visual riches of the Pacific Northwest landscape. My relationship with photography began as a secondary part of my wilderness experience, supplementing my passion for exploring and climbing. Eventually, or perhaps inevitably, as it seems now, my appreciation for the diversity of light, color, and form that I was seeing grew to the point where photography has become the primary emphasis of my time in wild country.
What first brought me to the incomparable Enchantments Lakes Basin was the challenge of climbing Prusik Peak. What brought me back however, was the memory of an October morning when the rising sun lit the stands of larches afire with gold, a fire reflected and intensified in the clear water of a still alpine lake. What continues to draw me back to the mountains, lakes, and glaciers of my home is the promise of another sunrise in Dakobed Country, another moonlit lake in the Okanagan, another subalpine meadow of red, blue, yellow and white in the Goat Rocks, another unique conjunction of time and place in a landscape of inspiration that will never be exhausted.