I grew up in Alabama and Tennessee, the land of sticks and ticks. But every year, my dad, who has as much an appreciation for this wild North American continent as I do, would take our whole family somewhere to the mountains. Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and the list goes on. Even at home, my brother, sister and I would always be somewhere in the woods exploring, trying to find new features of the forest around our property we had not previously known about. And as I got older, naturally I started hiking, backpacking, kayaking, climbing - any excuse I could find to be outside. The photography came more as a way for me to capture the essence of everything about the outdoors I had come to love, both to remember it by and for sharing it with others.