Blog
Final Words
Nearly a year ago, I had the great good fortune to be assigned a story on Mike Yochim. Yochim was a park ranger in Yellowstone National Park for many years before he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. When I met him last fall, he was in a wheelchair and had lost the use of his entire body except for his eyes. He could still blink and look up and down and from side to side. But otherwise, he was entombed…
A Surprise Gift
One of the best surprise gifts of my writing career has been the opportunity to write children’s books. When a commissioning editor reached out to me about writing National Parks of the U.S.A., I thought…why not? Little did I know that books live in the world in a different way than magazine articles, and I am still blessed with the rewards even a couple years after it was released. Readers tag the book in Instagram posts, send me photos of their kids enjoying it, and…
New Book! 100 Hikes of a Lifetime
From the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a trail snakes down cliffs deep into a labyrinth of stone. The Havasupai people have lived in a flat verdant valley here for countless generations, growing beans, corn, and squash and reaping the blessings of a limestone aquifer filled with blue-green water. Today, the area is still only reachable on foot, and hikers arrive in numbers, drawn by the legendary turquoise waterfalls that pour off cliffs and collect in idyllic pools below the village of Supai. On…