I’m an outdoors person. I come by it honestly -- Daniel Boone is in my blood. My father grew up on the flatlands of the Gulf Coast, but the urge for the mountains struck him early when he went on a Boy Scout trip to west Texas. Daniel Boone was in his blood too.

My parents met as undergrads in college. They married and went to southern California for Grad School in part to be near the mountains (Yosemite) and deserts (especially Death Valley and Joshua Tree). I got started not much later, and they took me camping in Yosemite before I was born. Mom still talks about that night sleeping on a picnic table with dad defending the food cache from the bears.

We were of modest means, so family vacations were camping trips. Three kids in diapers, and another later on, didn't stop them from taking us camping. We just loaded up the family van and headed out. We usually took one long trip (2 weeks) and several short trips every year.

The long trips alternated annually between family reunion trips to Texas or Florida (Mom’s home state) and trips to wild places around the western U.S. We drove and camped on the Texas trips, but took the train or bus to Florida. On one Texas trip, we drove back through central Mexico and I got my first taste of the Central American jungle. On the trips to Florida, the southern swamps passing by the window fascinated me, and I would stand on the platform between cars and hang out the open window watching the water and moss-covered trees pass by in hopes of seeing a big-old gator.

The short trips usually were 2- and 3-day weekend campouts to the mountains, beaches, and deserts around southern California, but we often spent spring break and parts of our summer vacations camping for a week or so. Joshua Tree and Anza Borrego were favorite winter destinations, and the beach at San Clemente was a favorite during spring-break. Mom often took us during spring break because dad had to work.

Even with all of this activity, Dad still found time to backpack with his buddies from work. He got his first 35 mm camera in 1965 and started doing slide shows of his trips. Watching his slides, I longed to join him backpacking, and dad took me out for the first time when I was 10. We hiked into Little Lakes Basin at the head Rock Creek on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains for a couple of days. I was a big-time fisherman back then, but when I went out fishing, I got turned around and couldn't find my way back to camp. After hiking in circles a couple of times in the fading evening light, I realized that I might be in for a long, cold night. I stopped walking, thought about the situation, looked at the lay of the land, figured out how to find camp, and walked right in. Daniel Boone was in my blood, and I was hooked.

Dad then began taking me out with his backpacking buddies. We did Mt. Russell (over 14,000 feet) in the Sierras when I was 13. I went on three backpacking trips when I was 14, not counting Boy Scout trips. When I was 15, I picked up my backpack and hitchhiked alone to the Canadian border, but they wouldn't let me in; I probably would have gone all the way to Alaska. When I was 16, I did 30 days on the John Muir Trail in the high Sierras without resupplies. At 17, I did it again a little farther south. At 18, I was the mule hauling 80-pound packs on week-long backpacking trips with the family.

As a kid, I climbed on every rock I could find, but by the time I was 16, my parents said no more until I learned to use a rope. That was all it took, and we were off to Tuolumne Meadows for the Yosemite basic rock climbing class. A day or two later I did my first roped climb when some friendly climbers lowered a belay line from the tip of Cathedral Peak and I tied in using a bowline-on-a-coil.

During my Junior and Senior years in high school, I climbed every chance I got. My buddies and I would leave town after school and drive to Joshua Tree or one of the other southern California climbing areas. We would climb all day Saturday and Sunday, and drive home Sunday night.

After graduating from high school, I was a climbing bum for a few years. I worked when I had to, but I spent most of my time in Yosemite Valley during the spring and Joshua Tree during the winter, and places like Tuolumne Meadows, Big Rock, Tahquitz, the high Sierra during winter, and Red Rocks thrown in for interest.

Life was sweet, but I had to make a living. I worked the first two summers out of high school with the US Forest Service in the woods of northern Idaho thinning trees, cruising timber, burning clearcuts, and fighting forest fires. I even did a stint working on a helicopter logging operation. I loved working in the woods, but I realized that I didn't want to spend my life plundering the forest, I wanted to protect the woods: it was a park ranger’s life for me.

Rangering required college, so off I went. I got rejected from Humboldt State University on the northern California coast, so I went to the adjacent community college instead. I ran out of rent money, so I spent much of the winter and spring camping on the edge of Humboldt Bay. Being mostly broke, I went crabbing, clamming, and fishing for dinner after classes.

With summer coming on and a few dollars in my pocket saved from not paying rent, wanderlust set in hard. A buddy and I hoisted packs and followed our thumbs north to Alaska. Hard to believe they let us into Canada that time -- we were even carrying a rifle. We made it to Dawson City, Northwest Territories, then met two French Canadians and spent ten days with them floating down the Yukon River to Circle, Alaska. After restocking in Fairbanks, we headed north again and spent two weeks hiking across the tundra hunting and fishing, standing literally nose-to-nose with a bull moose, seeing 24-hours sunlight, zillions of mosquitoes -- I’d been in wilderness before, but never in such wildness.

We headed south to Denali and did a long trek along the northwest side of the peak. Denali was amazing for wildlife, fast moving water, and grand open scenery.

... hunting and fishing across Alaska, I would have made old Dan proud.

With fall coming on, I left my friend in Alaska and headed back to college in 29 Palms, California, the headquarters of Joshua Tree National Park. I lived and climbed in the park, took classes, taught technical rock rescue to the rangers, and ended up getting a job with the Park Service. I ended up doing a couple of seasonal stints at Lake Mead, the Grand Canyon, and Joshua Tree.

In one of the technical rock rescue classes I was teaching, I had a student who was a botanist volunteering for the park collecting Bighorn Sheep scat. She took the scat apart to identify the plants the sheep were eating -- a woman after my own heart. Pathetic, I know -- I ended up marrying one of my students. Our honeymoon was a 3-month camping and birding trip across the southern US border (San Diego, CA, to Brownsville, TX), around the Gulf of Mexico, down to the Florida Keys, and out to Puerto Rico.

We went back to college together, and this time I was accepted at Humboldt State. We spent four years in college and worked as rangers in Sequoia National Park during the summers. I earned a wildlife degree, and Liz earned one in botany. We hiked, backpacked, and climbed a little during those years, but we spent most of our free time birding the Humboldt Bay marshes, the sandy beaches, and the rocky headlands.

Little did we know it at the time, but minor experiences at Humboldt State would change our lives and set the direction for our future for years to come. We were birders -- everything we did revolved around birds -- my wildlife degree actually was a "duck ranching" degree. However, I was fascinated by two topics: statistics and evolution. I took all the stats classes I could; I even made money tutoring statistics. In my senior year, I had to take a field techniques class before I could graduate, so I decided to do a small mammal trapping project because it might be the last chance I would ever have to do so. I caught mice in sand dune and forest habitats, measured their feet, and used stats to look for differences. Little did I know that I was setting out on a path that I would follow for the rest of my life.

When we graduated, we accepted a pair of research positions out of the University of Georgia doing fieldwork on barrier islands (National Park Service areas) off the coast of Georgia and North Carolina. I was doing wildlife biology (small mammals and birds) and Liz was doing botany -- and we thought life was good. We should have realized, however, that there must have been a problem with the positions given that the University of Georgia had an entire School of Forest Resources, and Institute of Ecology, a Museum of Natural History, and myriad other sources of labor, and despite this, they had to go all the way to the West Coast to find workers. It turned out that nobody at the University of Georgia would work for our boss.

We made the best of a difficult situation for the field season (9 months) and spent our free time exploring our new environment. We wandered the barrier islands and coastal marshes, we fished the surf and sound, canoed the hardwood swamps, goofed with alligators and snakes, and fought off zillions of mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and biting flies.

After the field season, we got into grad school at the University of Georgia. Liz worked on campus in the biology labs doing high-tech genetic research on things like rice and the common cold. When I wasn't in class, I was out in the swamps chasing field mice (Cotton Mice, Peromyscus gossypinus). I spent many months in a lab with no windows or behind a computer working, but my research required spending a lot of time camping and wandering the swamps and mountains around the southeast in search of field mice.

The Yucca Mountain Project is the U.S. Department of Energy project to take all of the spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants around the country, plus some other high-level radioactive waste, and bury it forever in the bottom of Yucca Mountain. I started as a Senior Scientist studying the environment before the radioactive waste arrived to see what was there. In the future, scientists could compare their results with ours to see if anything changed. I was responsible for managing the small mammal and reptile (except desert tortoise) programs.

My first two years on the Yucca Mountain Project were great, except that I had two bosses that didn't like each other, and I was often caught in the middle of their dysfunctional relationship. At least they agreed on disliking their boss, so we three always had something to agree on. Despite this, I could go out for a week at a time to work the study plots, and the time spent catching rodents (mostly kangaroo rats and pocket mice) and lizards (mostly side-blotched lizards) was priceless.

After the second year, the Yucca Mountain Project budget ran into a political ripsaw orchestrated by Senator Harry Reid and other opponents of the project. The project funding was cut dramatically, and the Department of Energy decided that they didn't need any more environmental data. We laid off our 60-some field crew, and the Senior Scientists started analyzing data and writing up final reports. As each of us finished, they too were laid off. It didn't take long before everyone else started slowing down, and it seemed to take forever to get reports finished. I was fortunate because I had more reports to write than the others, but it only took me a year to finish mine. When it was my turn to be laid off, one manager asked why I, the productive one, was getting the boot while the slackers were staying on. They decided to have me help the others finish their reports. This didn't go over well with my colleagues, but after another year, all of the reports were done.

I continued applying for university jobs those 4 years and doing other things to improve my chances of getting a university job. For example, Liz and I spent one day per week working as Research Associates (volunteers) at the Nevada State Museum cleaning up and organizing the mammal collection, and we tried to develop relationships with professors at the local university. As the years passed and the rejection letters piled up, however, it became apparent that we could continue spending a lot of our time and hoping for what we couldn't get, or we could sit back and enjoy the life we had.

I was offered the chance to stay on the Yucca Mountain Project with my current salary if I would join the Technical Editing group and work with geologists and hydrologists. Helping other people write reports wasn't what I had dreamed of, but we decided to take our lemons and make lemonade.

I worked hard during those years and put in a lot of overtime, but I quit spending time doing things to get ahead, and started spending more time on the things I enjoy. We started hiking and camping more, and in 2001, I went on my first backpacking trip in more than a decade. In 2002, I went on two backpacking trips; in 2003, I did 3; 4 in 2004; 5 in 2005, 6 in 2006, and 7 in 2007. Keeping this up is going to be real problem by 2025!

Our lemonade turned out to be sweet, and in 2006, I gave up my well-paying editing job for a low-paying field job counting plants for the U.S. Geological Survey and living in the bush. I did my time in Purgatory; it was time to be free. The USGS adventure didn't turn out so well, but it led to even bigger and better things. I'm still doing what I love, only now I'm making more money than I ever made before.

The more I think about being free, the more I realize that Daniel Boone is still in my blood.

Well, I turned 50 yesterday. Many times you hear about people engaging in some act of stamina or courage on the their 50th birthday just to prove to themselves that they still have what it takes. I thought about doing some memorable feat on my birthday too, but I came to realize that I didn't need to prove anything to myself, so I stayed home, relaxed in the air conditioning (105 degrees outside), and ate ice cream for lunch.

I've been out a lot lately photographing my feathered and four-legged friends in the mountains, and that is where I'll be tonight. I'm heading for a spring in the mountains where I can sit quietly, contemplate the little delights in life, and photograph my friends as they come by for a drink and an evening bath.