It seems like that’s what my life is. One period of starting over followed by another. This time I’m doing in in Montana. On nights like this, sitting around drinking wine and listening to Counting Crows, I can’t help but wonder how long it will last this time.

But I will say this: here in the front range of the Beartooth Mountains, I have never felt more at home. I feel more at home here than I ever did, even when I was at home, growing up in the soulless suburbs of Minneapolis. This town is small, but it has character. It has a mix of locals and tourists, dive bars and good restaurants, and it is underlain by miles of underground workings, from a coal mine that closed in the beginning of the 19th century. Ten miles east of town, I am in the high desert, where the setting sun paints a lonely crimson tone on the badlands and sandstone canyons. Ten miles south of town, I am at almost 11,000 elevation, looking down on the clouds from an alpine oasis. Ten miles north of town, and I am in spectacular rolling prairie, where the golden hills are back-dropped by snow-capped peaks stretching to both horizons. Ten miles west of town, and I am immersed in high-country wilderness, where miles of hiking trails take me to an infinite mountain playground dotted with cold, clear mountain lakes and spectacular rocky streams.

It’s the place I always dreamed about when I was a child, when I closed my eyes and imagined a better life that I was sure I’d someday grow up to live. Or close enough, anyways. It’s not Alaska, but it will do for now.

The bad part, at the moment, is that I’ve been crazy busy with the new job. I am working with the geology crew at a nearby platinum and palladium mine, which itself is nestled in a spectacular mountain valley near the headwaters of a world-class trout stream. The mine does its best to hide its surface disturbance, bends over backwards to make little to no noise or light pollution for the nearby community, and has never had an environmental issue or citation since it began mining in 1986. It’s a fantastic place to work, and I am very fortunate to be able to come out here and “do some geology.”

But meanwhile, the cameras have been mostly sitting on the shelf. That will be changing soon, however, as I will be changing crews to rotate underground full time. At this point I will have a lot more free time to play with, so stay tuned for new stuff in the very near future.

I hope all is well in your corner of the world as well.

Which leads me to pointing out the obvious bonus of the “dual-sport” motorcycle, like my little blue Yamaha. There’s quite literally nowhere it can’t take me, from winding country highways to gravel backroads, to powerline trails and forested single-track. The photo to the left is a section of trail in northwestern Wisconsin, as I made my way back home to St. Paul from Duluth. The trail more or less parallels a sandy gravel road, which follows the upper St. Croix River through endless acres of state and county forest. It was a beautiful spring day, and I had the whole place to myself. This, to me, is what the motorcycle is all about. Slowing down, taking your time, breathing in the world around you instead of separating yourself from it with air conditioning and tempered glass.

But even better is the people you meet while traveling. Nearly every time I stop for gas or just to take a break, someone comes up to me and admires my bike, asks about my ride, sometimes offering tips on good places to see in the area. Sometimes it’s other riders out for a cruise, sometimes it’s other riders in the middle of epic thousand-mile journeys, sometimes it’s people who used to ride but lost the time, and sometimes it’s people who always wanted a motorcycle but don’t know where to start. That’s something you don’t get when traveling by car, and it reminds me that there are still a lot of good people out there in the world, and everyone has a life story that’s incredible in its own way.

But anyways, I know this isn’t much of a post, and it doesn’t have any fancy photos. But I am not dead, I am still out there trying to travel when I can. In fact, since it’s my oilfield job that’s been taking over my life and preventing said travel, I have recently resigned. Things are about to get a whole lot better. Stay tuned…

Well, I wasn’t going to put up any galleries until I had some new photographs to post. However, it was requested that I put up a gallery from my trip to Alaska and Yukon back in 2009. It wasn’t a photo journey, it was a temporary prospecting contract, my first geology “job” out of college. I flew to Anchorage and met GK, and we made a beeline to the Yukon to start a regional mineral study, to evaluate the region’s potential for a certain rare semi-metal.

Ever since I read Jack London’s “White Fang” when I was a kid, I dreamed of someday heading to Dawson and spending some time in Yukon and Alaska. Being given the opportunity to finally see it all was like the realization of that boyhood dream. And getting paid to do it, while seeing what few tourists ever get to see, was sweet icing on the cake. We flew into remote exploration camps, drove a thousand miles of back-roads, and met a few good people along the way. Unfortunately, however, we didn’t find much of what we were sent out to find. So soon after the snow appeared steady in the mountains, our contract ended and I returned to North Dakota to take a job in the booming oilfields.

But I fell in love with the world “North of 60,” and I will return at the first opportunity.

The photos in this gallery are not artsy-fartsy. I took them with a pocket digital as we made our way around the region. So it’s not the typical gallery you should expect to see here, but I think it’s worth sharing anyways. You can see the full set on the Flickr page I used to post photos as we went along.

nearlyfreespeech uses php safe_mode which can’t be turned off. This script basically allows writing to files only when the ‘owner’ and ‘group’ names are the same. By default, WordPress uses the group name ‘me,’ or something similar, while you might use something else, like ‘web.’ You can check ownership, groups, and permissions using most FTP clients. So, while WordPress installed correctly, and the Photocrati theme installed correctly, I still got error messages about file permissions and “blah blah this needs to be writable blah blah.” To fix this, you need to connect to your host via SSH and change the group name for WordPress, and while you’re at it, set the permissions of your directories and files to the appropriate levels. This also needs to be done every time an automatic upgrade takes place, or any new plugin gets installed. There is a much more detailed description on this blog.

So, now that we’re well underway, the rest of the site should be along shortly. I added a thumbnail gallery to the front page, and I also added a contact form so you can harass me from the comfort of home. As for the missing content in the Gallery page, well that’s part of my ongoing resolution to shoot more. All of the photos on the main page represent my favorites from the past six years or so, and the only other content I will be adding is new stuff when I get around to creating it. There’s actually quite a few photos missing from the pile of favorites I used to create the front page gallery, but about three years ago my desktop crashed unexpectedly, and I, stupidly, had nothing backed up anywhere else. Let my idiocy be a lesson to all of you. Back up your stuff. Then back up your backups. Because losing several years worth of pictures and data will make you sad.

That’s all for now. I’m very happy about switching to the WordPress platform, once I got it all installed and working right, building and updating the website is a breeze. No more screwing with code for this guy. Cheers!

The design theme was provided by Photocrati, which is super cool and allows for tons of customized features. Photocrati also uses the proceeds to provide grants to photographers around the world, who are working on important humanitarian and environmental projects. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

So, please be patient as Lost Highway moves into the future. The site should be fully up and running within a few days. Until then, you can view some of my photos at my old TrekLens Gallery.