Born in 1951, in a sharecropper’s shack in Arkansas, my father’s, I was raised in Western Montana. I have been traveling in Montana’s backcountry since 1963. That same year I took my first winter trip.
During the summer of 1961, the year I turned 10 years old, I picked up the novel Fighting Caravans by Zane Grey. An instantly smitten bookworm, I read several more books before the summer was over.
In 1964, I pulled a rusted 35mm camera out of a business garbage can. Comparing it to that black box thingamajig, probably a Kodak Brownie my mother used on occasion, I was immediately mesmerized, no, I was intimidated by all the knobs and adjustment rings on the camera. Arriving in Vietnam five years later, within 60 days, I had bought my first camera.
Today I write because I have a couple things that I want to get off my chest. I still shoot pictures, occasionally of pretty things, but more often as a means to verify that I was there. My traveling days in the backcountry however, are almost over. Perhaps though I will be able to complete the final trip, which began in February 2014 and is at least five winters in length.
