By all accounts, he wasn’t an easy man, my grandfather. He pushed hard, asked a lot, expected excellence - or at least excellent effort - from all around him. But, also by all accounts, he didn’t have the easiest beginnings, so his idiosyncrasies can at least be understood, if not justified. Sadly, I never met […]

November 24, 2005, Nimaj, Rajasthan, India It was impossible to capture him. His face was topographic, lines etched deep, a storybook of years spent smiling and laughing, toiling and struggling, living under the blazing sun of central Rajasthan. Wende and I were back in India, this time taking our mothers on (what was then) an […]

As I wrote Tuesday’s “Mountains of Memories” post Do Hard Things, the photo of my friend Peter atop Bienn a’ Chruliaste made me think not just of the beauty of wilderness solitude, but also the loneliness and isolation felt by me - perhaps by many - during our current challenging times. So, a Thursday Thought […]

This post was written a couple weeks back, but I mistakenly saved it as a draft rather than publishing it. So, here it is, belatedly! Yesterday, I pored over photos from a decade ago, high in the remote, wild Picket Range of Washington State, stitching together a 350-degree panorama of these magnificent mountains from Luna […]