Welcome to my website!
I am a pretty square guy that likes to run around the mountains. This is probably the least not-interesting thing I do, so I’ve written some stories about it. I’m a civil engineer (now licensed in California!) and recently I decided to go back to school after career-land got a little boring and / or rigid for my tastes. 10 vacation days a year not enough to live well in my opinion. I am now based out of San Diego and pretty hooked on the laid-back SoCal lifestyle. Additionally I have met some truly first class folks through climbing. I think this is the main thing we’re all looking for — to do cool stuff with cool people. I climb because … IT’S REALLY FUN !
You’ll get a healthy dose of my half-baked writing on these topics in the pages that follow. If I ascribe big meanings to traipsing around the mountains it’s because doing so really changed my life for the better. I moved to California in 2013 to work at Naval Base Ventura County, and more importantly, to work with a former professor at UW-Madison who turned out to be an incredibly positive influence in my professional life. I don’t know that I would say I was depressed at the time, but I was caught in a state of perpetual angst and inactivity just like lots of other millenials these days (remember Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate?). Probably lots of young people feel the way I did and the friction arising from this is a natural part of growing up and finding your place in the world.
Given this unsettled background I was very lucky to stumble up the Tuttle Creek drainage after reading one of Eric’s peaksforfreaks trip reports. It signaled a monumental change in my life, and really deep deep down, this site is an attempt to convey how much being in the mountains means to me in the hopes that all of it could mean a lot to you, too. It would not be untrue to say I’ve felt much closer to God in the mountains than at any other time or place in my life………
My ‘trip reports’ if you can call them that, don’t have a whole lot of useful information. You’ll find very little in the way of hiking distances and times, elevation gained, route notes, and so on…possibly because my engineering work requires meticulous documentation and the last thing I want to do in my free time is to keep track of even more numbers! Rather I try to give ‘the feeling’ a trip gives me and hopefully provide some inspiration to would-be adventurers attempting similar outings. You can at least glean some valuable information by osmosis, like the time of year, the route selected, and some of the more esoteric details like the condition of the snow or chossiness of the rock.
I’ve also taken a fairly methodical yet long and meandering tack in working up to more technical routes. I received much schooling from simply wandering around the Sierra Nevada, scrambling all kinds of class two and three routes before ever tying into a rope. So hopefully readers can appreciate the work and patience involved in tackling technical routes in the mountains. Of course my way isn’t the only way (that is to say, many weekend trips in between the 9 to 5 lifestyle), but it might be more appealing for those discovering mountains and climbing later in life. Climbing lends itself beautifully to a lifetime of learning and simple pleasure. Getting high off the ground, in all its forms, long or short, close to the road or back in the mountains — is a universal joy — climbing is for everyone.
I suppose that’s all for now. The website currently consists of the trip reports I mentioned above, but maybe I will add some fun professional-related projects eventually. I am a nerd at heart. Hope you enjoy the site such as it currently is and send me a message if you would like some extra information about one of my trips!
“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures………………”