Field Notes

I’m offended by the smoke that has invaded our valley. I’ve heard all my life that smoke follows beauty. Around a campfire, it’s an old...

I spend a lot of time outside—enough that I should probably worry more about skin cancer than I do. I'd always figured my coloring kept me...

If someone asked for volunteers to run laps around the high school track, I'd be the last hand up. The reaction comes before the thought —...

I spent late Tuesday afternoon hiking up Bunnells Fork. It's not a famous trail. Not particularly difficult. Just a good trail tucked away...

While I slept well the last few nights from cold temperatures, I couldn’t help but think about the orchards. That’s the trade this time of...

I haven’t written much the past few weeks. Not because life has been full. More because it hasn’t. Just not in ways that resolve into...

We were the first vehicle at the trailhead that morning. Snow was falling, not sideways or dramatic, just steady and confident. South Fork...

I’ve read too much about sleep lately. And I’m working on it—which seems oxymoronic. Shouldn’t I just be mostly unaware for seven or eight...

In storytelling, a throughline is the line of force that carries a narrative forward. It’s the path a story naturally wants to take—the...

The other day, I drove up the canyon to “check if it’s still there,” or so I told my daughter on the phone as I accelerated. I didn’t have...

I first learned to read the clock in abouts. Half past. Quarter till. Top of the hour. About nine o’clock. Before atomic time and the...

I had just flipped a U-turn at the top of South Fork Canyon and started heading back down when I saw it—first only a lazy V of a large,...

Madeleine L’Engle once borrowed this phrase for a story about time, light, and the battle between darkness and hope. I’ve borrowed it...

“And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” — Genesis 2:19 We don’t always see, hear, or smell what...

With the seasons changing, I’m writing this in near-dark early one morning. My screen glows in my face—an otherworldly glow that...

I took some family members hiking recently to see if we could locate Native American rock art in the foothills near town. A year earlier...

In June and July, only the earliest risers catch the quietest hour. Pre-dawn. First light. Morning’s earliest names belong to those who...

This year, my area went ninety-six days without measurable precipitation. By now, we’d typically have around five inches. Instead, trails...

Step from sunlight into shade on a summer day, and your body knows the difference before your mind can name it. The air cools. Colors...

People around me often speak, but I don’t hear them—or at least not clearly. It’s not that I’m deaf. It’s that I’m elsewhere. My mind...

In the American West, water is never just water. It is inheritance, leverage, and law. It has been bought, sold, diverted, fought over,...

If you go north long enough, eventually you’ll go south. But if you go west forever, you’ll never go east. That simple geographic truth...

Wouldn’t it have been something—to have had an empathetic companion at every milestone? Not someone to fix it or tell us what to do, but...

One afternoon not long ago, I stood beside a pond. The light was soft, and the water mostly still—except for two ducks gliding toward each...

Two weeks ago, the sun stood still. June 21—the solstice—marked the year’s longest light. I’ve started calling it Great Feeder Day. It’s...

I once fell thirty feet off the Red Slab in Rock Canyon. I say “thirty” because that’s where I stopped—but it began as a fifteen-foot...

Mountain biking the other day, I rounded a tight bend on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail and nearly crashed into a hiker hidden by thick...

The other day, I rode hard for a couple of hours, cutting through new spring growth of scrub oak and wild roses, mapping unfamiliar...

People occasionally ask why I return to the canyon so often. My wife, with genuine curiosity. Friends, with a teasing edge. Even my kids,...

There’s a spot along the canyon trail where the river shoulders into a hard left bend—calm on the inside, turbulent on the outside, like...

A World Built for Walking Last weekend, I drove cattle from winter pasture to summer grazing lands. We could’ve trucked them, but the...

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." — Ralph Waldo Emerson Last week, as I walked through the Boston Public Garden, I was...

There’s a flowering crabapple outside my window that tells me something I can’t see—when the wind is up. No sound, just motion: spring...

There are moments—quiet, sudden, unbidden—when the world opens. A canyon flickers in the last light of day. Snow hushes everything. A...

Shortly after the massive explosion of industrial growth following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger warned that...

Winter in Utah County hits hard and often overstays its welcome. The cold settles in, clinging to the valley floor, and the...

Cold bites the air, frost grips the earth. Beneath the surface, something stirs—midwinter is not stillness, but a quiet revolution. Weeks...

Big Springs is my favorite haunt, no matter the season. Winter transforms it into something entirely different—quiet, vast, and alive with...

A few months ago, I was studying Mt. Timpanogos on a map—one of my favorite ways to pass time—when I noticed something unusual. One of its...

When John Muir wrote, "The mountains are calling, and I must go," he didn’t realize how deeply I’d feel that call in my bones. There is...