A precarious place to decide to sit down

We have to go back to the time before digital cameras, megapixels and memory cards to arrive at the year I discovered Glacier National Park. It was 1997, and all my pics were taken with a 35mm Nikon camera. You'll have to excuse the grainy resolution of some of the scanned images.

Here my good friend Kyle sits, seemingly bereft from anything stable, on a pillar of limestone below the south-facing summit cliffs of Mt Wilbur. This climb began with 6 people, but was whittled down to 4 when a good friend fell on a lower rock band and tore her ACL. Suffice to say that the climb became very interesting when two things happened: it began snowing while we were on the summit, and then, when descending the mountain's Chimney Route, we realized the rope had gone with our injured friend! Undeterred, we tied together some webbing and came safely down the chimney.

One happy dog

And this is the other member of our small, but rapidly expanding, family-- our energetic border collie Camper! Kind of looks like he's ready to bounce right off the screen doesn't it?

The most important person in my life

This is a photo of my lovely wife Christa during a hike in the Bitterroot Mountains. She is my confidante, my truth, the one I look to in times of need--she is my best friend. Although we've shared many adventures together, nothing will compare to the experience of building a family together.

The genesis of The Heart's Great Red Basin

I'm excited to begin this blog site documenting my passion for wilderness adventure, and the remarkable unfolding of the lives of my wife, Christa, and I as we start a new family. The content of this blog will entail much about adventures taken here in Montana and afar, but also a fair bit about perhaps the greatest adventure of all, that being the pregnancy and birth of our new child.

Please feel free to browse my photos, read the journal entries and comment on anything you like, or just say hello!

About the blog name "The Heart's Great Red Basin"-- You'll soon notice in my blog posts that I have a particular fondness for the Northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, especially Glacier National Park. Towering above the Many Glacier Valley, on the east side of the Continental Divide, is a grand stratified mountain called Mt Henkel (see title photo). Viewing the massive formation from the popular Swiftcurrent trailhead gives one the impression of a giant bird with wings outspread. A common climbing route follows the main drainage, called the "South Couloir", and enters the said great red basin, which is actually just a thick layer of oxidized sedimentary mudstone, or argillite. Nevertheless, since first climbing the route years ago that red basin seemed a perfect metaphor for not only the heart of the mountain, but of my love for those crumbling, billion-year old rock mountains as well.