Phoenix, Sedona & Flagstaff

The adventure continues! It was wonderful to visit Kristal and her precious dog, Nani, in Phoenix. The 104-degree, super dry temperatures were a shock to the system and even after dark the heat hovered in the mid-90's. While it seems extreme, Arizonians are happy to trades a few weeks of extreme heat for year-around mild temps perfect for outdoor adventuring!





We enjoyed the views atop South Mountain(Phil got his first up close view of a Cactus), enjoyed attending the Cathedral in downtown Phoenix, took Nani to play in one of many dog parks in the area, enjoyed some shopping, sun bathing and grilling. It was great to spend time with Kristal!










On Monday, we took a quick 2-hour drive up to Sedona, home a plethora of red rock formations. It was gorgeous and a perfect, slightly overcast day for adventuring. Phil and I went on our first hike together! We started off with a light hike around Bell Rock, a formation that resembles a handbell resting on the canyon. We toured some of Sedona then climbed Cathedral Rock, a more challenging route, that gave us views of the entire canyon. We met a number of great hikers and while touring the Holy Cross Chapel, a Catholic Church built right into the side of a red rock formation, we met a couple that had been married there 47-years prior!


In the evening, we took an incredibly scenic drive out of Sedona and into Flagstaff. Well-forested switchback roads built up to incredible mountaintop views as we climbed out of the canyon. The desert has so very many faces, each with surprisingly unique characteristics. Today, we're off to the Grand Canyon!

Midland, Carlsbad and Phoenix

Two days into Southwest Road Trip 2010 and I'm so very happy to be adventuring!! I crammed the last of my worldly things into a 5'x5' storage unit Friday morning before leaving Dallas. It is strange to think that they will hibernate, packed up and squared away - patiently waiting for my return at the end of August.

Phil and I left Dallas on Friday early afternoon and headed out to Midland, TX to spend time with Mitch, a long-time friend from Camp Summit, whom I met as a counselor in college. Mitch and I have had the opportunity to stay in touch for the last 5 years as pen pals and have celebrated an annual camp reunion each summer since. It was an incredible blessing to spend time with his huge and wonderful family. What a precious time!

In the morning, Phil and I hit the road for Carlsbad. The drive itself was an education in what makes west Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, wild. Within minutes of getting on the highway, we were seeing large patches on the asphalt. Large, furry, round, legged-patches, creatures creeping across the lanes. After I saw the second of a series of them I realized they were tarantulas! I could not have been happier to be in the car!

Our drive was full of extravagant scene changes from flat, dry grassy planes to green rolling hills, ranches, red-dirt fields, orchards and ominous mountains. Even the weather was dynamic, starting cool in the morning, reaching high 90's, plummeting to chilling temperatures at dusk in the mountains then back to sauna-style highs once we arrived in Phoenix in the late evening. In a 24-hour period we witnessed a cloudless morning, brilliantly sunny afternoon, a windy evening quickly followed by stillness and an enthralling lightning show which danced between the mountain ranges, a light rain and then cloudless midnight sky.

We took a detour to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where we perused a local outdoor artisan market then journeyed approximately 800-feet under the surface of the earth to view rock formations in one of the largest caverns in the world. Carlsbad Caverns are more than 14 football fields in length and reach unknown depths. We spent a few hours checking out stunning formations and walking the length of one of the larger rooms within the cavern. Masterpieces of naturally occurring calcium deposits took on countless shapes, positions and colors as they appointed incredible, intricately decorated rooms within the caverns. It was a study in the creative genius of the Creator and was an incredible blessing for us to see!

We followed up the cavern visit with a quick picnic lunch then a 9-mile off-road drive up, over and down into some of the most scenic mountains and valleys in Carlsbad National Park. Afterward, we drove the remaining 10-hour stretch to my sister's place in Phoenix, AZ. The trip brought us to the edge of El Paso, just north of the Mexico boarder, in and out of New Mexico and into Arizona. The drive was spectacular - full of wonderful and abundant conversation and incredible views!

We look forward to a day off the road and full of time with my sister here in Phoenix!

Prep and Packing!

This week is one outlined and defined by lists - what to pack, read, complete; who to call, make appointments with, and visit; where to go and where to store my things. As this chapter on preparation and careful tying up of all lose-ends commences, I'm finding myself more and more eager to hit the road and to actually writing out the introduction of the next great volume of this life story!

I have officially departed from my consulting job of more than 3.5 years. I was blessed to work and learn alongside incredible peers and leadership. I am thankful that many of the relationships I gained are ones that will last well into the future and extend well beyond a professional capacity. I will take lessons learned in the consulting realm with me well into the future.

As a next step, I'll be packing up all of my things and storing them during the summer. I will be starting fresh on housing upon my return to Dallas after the National Outdoor Leadership School course wraps up at the end of August.

That said, I realized yesterday that, at this point, I will be both jobless and homeless upon my return to Texas in early September - how terrifyingly exhilarating!! In my heart this translates to - I am going to be (I'm going to try to be) fully available for whatever the Lord's plan is in my life and I am elated to consider the way that He is positioning me with no pre-established commitments beyond coursework....

I'll be working out a housing and job situation remotely during my stead in CA and am confident that regardless of where I end up on either of those fronts, it will be an adventure!! There is something incredibly freeing already about the unknown. I'm being drawn into a place of leaning heavily on our Father in heaven and while it is intimidating at times, He has promised faithfulness til the end.

Chapter 1: The beginning

It is with a sense of nostalgia that I set the foundation of this blog. When hiking along the Appalachian Trail after graduating from college, a friend and I discovered a fundamental constant in the tangled, beautiful, wild mess of order that blanketed Appalachia - it was the 'blaze'.

Over the years, committed hikers and volunteers worked to identify a path, a genuine route, that would lead hikers along one of the longest foot trails in the world. And so it was, that a group of individuals, with a heart for the outdoors, set out to create a system of 'blazes' - 2x4 inch, white paint swatches located approximately 5' from ground-level on trees, rocks and other relatively immobile features along the trail. These blazes have been around for years and mark every half-mile vertebrae of the 2,100+ mile backbone of the trail.

Here I am, standing at a new trail head in my life, transitioning from the path of consulting in corporate America and the securities and challenges it offered, to a wholly new terrain of counseling and wilderness therapy. I'll be blogging about the lay of the land, the breath-taking vantage points, daily challenges, moments of triumph and the 'blazes' that I find or create along the way.

Thank you for joining me, this will certainly be an adventure worth sharing...