Hello Everyone,
I am officially back to work and my first tour of the season is behind me. This is my 16th tour season and my second working for Incredible Adventures here in San Francisco. I had a great summer working for Incredible last year, one of the best I’ve had in my career in fact, and I’m looking forward to another great season to come. I will still be running tours for Exodus and Intrepid, two of the brands I have guided for many years now, and will continue to run short Incredible Adventures tours as well.
The start of the summer tour season is always exciting. It is full of possibilities and just thinking about the places I will visit and the people I will meet puts a smile on my face. I know it will be exhausting and things won’t always work out as planned or as hoped, but I also know I am up for the challenge. Over the winter I visited an old friend of mine, Brett, at his home in western Wales. Brett came on tour with me many years ago and he asked me while I was there if my guiding personality is the same as my real personality. I told him that the only way to be truly happy and successful in this job is to be yourself. The more you try and be like someone else or act in a way that isn’t reflective of your own personality, the more people will see through you and it will always backfire in the end. That being said, I also told him that while when I am guiding it is absolutely me that people are seeing, I also believe that it is the very best version of me that there is. It’s the version of me who is outgoing and confident and an absolute expert in my field. I think three steps ahead and change my plans based on each individual group I take out. There are a lot of unknowns in this game from traffic to the weather to the individual personalities and expectations of my passengers and being able to think on the fly and make things run smoothly is a real skill. Being a good guide doesn’t just happen overnight. Like any other profession it takes years to hone your skills, but it’s so worth the effort when you do. I’ve been turning people’s dreams into memories for the better part of two decades, and I’m thrilled that this is the skill I have to offer the world.
After I left you last week, I had one more day in the office which I will spare you the details of. I had to go grocery shopping to feed 12 hungry people for the weekend which is always a challenge. Thankfully I got all of that finished at a reasonable time and was able to take a nice long walk around downtown San Francisco and then tuck into a good book to refresh my knowledge of Yosemite and still get a good night’s sleep. I was up early on Friday as I had to get to the office, hook up my trailer to my van, load my coolers and get back downtown before 8am. I picked up my group on time and we headed out to Yosemite for the weekend.
Yosemite is pretty wild right now with all of the snow melting into the rivers and pouring over the edge of the cliffs and into the valley below. The waterfalls are crazy and there are even waterfalls flowing that I’ve never seen before. The river has overflowed its banks and the meadows have turned into lakes…
Lake Itasca State Park spans over 32,000 acres in North-Central Minnesota. Native Americans have hunted in this region for thousands of years. In more recent times the area was inhabited by semi-nomadic bands of Ojibwe and played a roll in the fur trade. In 1832 an Ojibwe leader and guide named Ozawindib guided explorer Henry Schoolcraft to the lake they called Omashkoozo-zaaga'igan (Elk Lake), where he showed Schoolcraft the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Schoolcraft chose a new name for the lake by combining the Latin words Veritas (truth) and Caput (head) to form ‘Itasca’ honoring the ‘true head’ of the Mississippi. A monument has been placed there marking the beginning of the river’s 2,552 mile run to the Gulf of Mexico and is one of the more iconic photos in the state. The park is so much more than just the headwaters though, with dozens of miles of trails, the historic Douglas Lodge, campgrounds, lakes and even a climbable fire tower. The area is so wonderful, in fact, that Minnesota declared it a state park in 1891 making it the oldest state park in the state and one of the oldest in the country. I had a wonderful day in Itasca State Park and found it one of the prettiest places I’ve seen in Minnesota. I hope you enjoy these photos from lovely Itasca State Park, a real gem in the heart of the state.
A few weeks ago I had the wonderful opportunity to go and spend a week with my brother in southern New Hampshire. We went out to explore some of the most beautiful parts of the area by car, by boat and on foot. The fall colors were just starting to kick into high gear, and some of the scenes we saw were truly spectacular. We saw covered bridges over the Ashuelot River, beautiful rural countryside and charming small towns like Hancock and Harrisville. I took a lot of photos, and this is the second post I’ve published with them to allow you to see the area through my lens. I hope you enjoy these photos from fabulous southern New Hampshire.
Myakka River State Park surrounds Florida’s first designated Wild and Scenic River. The river winds through a vast expanse of wetlands, prairies, hammocks and pine forest, and is a welcome break from the Tampa-St. Petersburg corridor just a little over an hour north. The park showcases an amazing diversity of flora and fauna and it felt so unspoiled when I visited. I went with my friend Amber, who is a serious naturalist, and she showed me all kinds of wonderful things while we were there. We started our visit at the suspension bridge and observation tower which took us through and then above the canopy for a bird’s eye view of the park. It was amazing to look out across the park and not see a building in any direction. From there we went and hiked out to Mossy Hammock Campground along the Fox’s High Road and were surrounded by live oak draped in Spanish moss and beautiful birdsong. We emerged into the prairies for a while, where her dog could run at full speed. When we finished our hike, we spent some time by the lake, enjoying the magical reflections we saw there. In all, it was an amazing day out in the wild with good company and beautiful weather. It was a little wet on the trails, but we managed. This was a great park to visit, and I hope you enjoy my photos from Myakka River State Park.
