The alarm cut through the dark at 3:45 a.m. in Austin, and I knew the day would start long before the sun. My flight left at six. That thin window of pre-dawn quiet always carried a certain weight — the stillness before momentum. The first-class upgrade helped ease the early sting, and as we rose over Texas and the plains beyond, I found myself studying the changing earth below: the veins of rivers, the shifting colors of Colorado and Idaho, the pale crowns of mountains I’d s

The desert stretched before them in an ocean of rust-red stone and jagged shadows. It was September 19, 2025—a Friday—and by the time Will, Tony, and I shouldered our packs and stepped onto the trail at 12:30, the sun was already merciless, its heat pressing down with the weight of an anvil. Dust rose with each footfall, swirling in the dry air like ghostly signals from another age.   Canyons towered on either side, cliffs etched by millennia of wind and water into colossal f

I had never set foot in Wyoming or Montana before this past summer. By the time I returned, I knew I would never see the world the same way again.   Alaska had first lit the fire in me years earlier—the vast wilderness, the raw beauty that pushed me into photography. But somewhere along the way, I had forgotten what it felt like to be small before nature’s grandeur. That spark lay dormant until this trip. Wyoming and Montana didn’t just reignite it. They threw gasoline on the

The story didn’t begin at the trailhead. It began weeks earlier, after I returned from the wilds of Wyoming and Montana—lands of vast skies and jagged peaks. That trip had left me riding a high of adventure, the kind that gnaws at you once you’re back at sea level, staring at the flat expanse of beach where “elevation” means negative ten feet.   I was restless. Fortunately, I had Jackson. Friend, fellow glutton for punishment, and the kind of guy who thought pain was just ano

Before I ever set foot on the boat in Turks and Caicos, the journey that led me there had already been years in the making. I was twenty-one, a college kid living in Florida with a camera that rarely left my hands and a pull toward the ocean that had been there my whole life. Most of my early work revolved around surfers and coastal landscapes — the kind of shots that come alive in the early morning light when the water’s still and the waves are clean. I’d grown up diving wit