Apr 2, 2013

  When I was completing my bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wyoming over a decade ago, I would drive from the big city of Laramie to the windy hills of Rawlins. I did this many weekends to do laundry, concentrate on homework away from distractions, and to eat my parents out of house and home.  Those days, the drive was little more than...

Mar 26, 2013

When Captain Jack Sparrow teetered onto the big screen with singular panache and that certain quirky and irresistible approach to most everything, it became clear quite quickly that pirates were about to make a comeback.  The pirate scene has never really bothered me.  I mean, black eye patches, colorful parrots on a shoulder and funky facial hair are mostly...

Mar 12, 2013

March 9th, 2013 marked a milestone for the Wiley Family: our one year birder-versary.   A year ago, the Wiley Family piled into the car with a small set of binoculars, a little black book for notes and bird lists, a crappy digital camera accompanied by a spunky and steely-eyed resolve to find and observe any and all birds within eyeshot. Our year of birding...

Mar 4, 2013

I love camping.  I love waking to the sounds of a slow running, melodic creek beating across soft stones and a mountain chickadee’s tunes hanging mysterious in the air.   The strong scent of evergreens bursts into the tent.  The cold air yields cloudy breath-smoke and a crackling fire slowly warms bones in a singular sensation.  It is overwhelming and...

Feb 26, 2013

Getting older is a bummer sometimes.  Suddenly and without warning, things that your parents or grandparents said that you thought insane, preposterous, or old-fashioned start to ring with truth – and disturbingly so.  My grandfather, who was an airplane mechanic overseas during World War II, once told me that he thought people were getting soft – that...

Feb 19, 2013

Last week, I spent days clicking through digital archives of personal outdoor photographs, mining ideas and brainstorming material for magazine cover possibilities.  The photos spilled over my eyes like a torrential downpour – a violent, immense waterfall.  Astounding enough was the seemingly endless quantity of photos emerging from dated and sorted...