I was born in central Ohio, and made an unpopular choice to attend college in Michigan. Never paid much attention to sports anyway.
During college, I did an internship in the Midcoast of Maine, with brief trips to Florida (for work) and Utah (for an extracurricular robotics club I ran). The following summer found me interning in Southern California, with another brief trip to Utah.
After wrapping up school, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, traveling north from Georgia to Maine. This was an exhilarating and eye-opening experience.
After the trail, I took an engineering job in coastal Connecticut. I returned to the A.T. just about every weekend to do volunteer trail work, camp, hike, and run.
Feeling more inspired by trail work than my engineering role, my next move was to Vermont, where I worked on trail and conservation projects with young adults for a summer. Following that, I worked in support of the A.T. in Pennsylvania for the fall, and then found an opportunity to work and play in the snow in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
I returned to Vermont the following summer, with brief trips to work at Philpott Lake in southern Virginia and along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Western North Carolina. I again returned to New Hampshire for the winter. I ended up staying there longer than the snow did, doing trail work and climbing in the White Mountains through the spring, summer, and fall. I also had the opportunity to do some work at Baxter State Park and Acadia National Park in Maine.
After that, I went on a long drive across the country to see friends, explore more of the world, and climb. Strangely enough, my next job still had me driving across the country, specifically to do trail and conservation work at different climbing areas from Texas to Missouri, from Tennessee to Maine. I spent the winter caretaking at an off-grid cabin back in New Hampshire, and then repeated this cycle again the next year.
Starting to tire of a nomadic existence, I fell in with a trail crew in New Hampshire. I went back and forth between trail crew and cabin caretaking for a couple years, and then landed a unique permanent role with the White Mountain National Forest, leveraging my combination of both summer and winter experience in the region. A pandemic happened partway through all of this, and I met a lovely lady who was willing to put up with me. We also welcomed an old mostly-blind, cute yet haggard cat to the family.
New Hampshire wasn't the right place for both of us though, so I was able to work remotely in support of WMNF for a year while we lived in the Bay Area of California. We got married, saw a bunch of seals, and did a surprising amount of rollerblading given how hilly the area is. The Bay Area also didn't feel like the right place for both of us, so we bounced across the country again and now call Western North Carolina home. We've shared our home with a revolving door of kittens and foster dogs, but now have an old, cute yet haggard dog who's with us for good. Limited economic opportunity and an unprecedented hurricane have made this area a bigger challenge than we expected, but we're still hanging on.
To be continued...