I’ve spent a goodly portion of the last two months saying over and over “Hi, Welcome”, doing my best to sound as happy as I truly am welcoming visitors to Sequoia National Park. That way when I follow up with the $30 cost of entering the park they are much more likely to feel good about paying this chunk of money towards this particular park of choice. Things have slowed quite a bit since I got here but it’s not unusual to say this a couple/few hundred times in a day. While hands down I prefer a more interpretive interaction with park visitors, I have enjoyed this position and feel grateful that we have been able to continue seeing where this NPS avenue might take us.

Today I am welcoming you to our new website. Tim put in a great many hours moving over our old blog. The format is different and so the old blogs are a little screwy with pictures that are much too large. An unfortunate side effect to what is otherwise a beautiful website. He also set up an online store of his photographs. Many of these photos are from our travels last year and from this year’s more stationary explorations in Mojave National Preserve and Sequoia National Park. These photos can be order in large format or even as greetings cards, should you take a fancy to any.

During our travels last year we enjoyed getting our thoughts onto “paper” and creating a type of road map through our writing. It felt good, was a fun collaboration and looking back at what we wrote stirs many memories that are already beginning to get buried. Many of these memories are worth revisiting, revising and augmenting with some of the larger stories involved around the places we visited. Tim has begun this process with the Nature Walk books and podcast. In a mash up of our punk rock and buddhist personalities we are moving forward by starting “where we are”. Meaning we don’t have top of the line recording equipment or production capabilities but feel that we’re doing alright with what we’ve got and hope that you all will appreciate what we’re putting out there.

Lately we’ve been saying welcome to a fresh carpet of green grass. After some much needed rain our very brown neighborhood burst alive, while at the same time many trees lost their leaves. With Tim spending half his life in California and me my whole life we’re reminded there is still so much to learn and love about this misaligned Mediterranean climate. Looking to the future we’ll continue to document this amazing planet with our photos and words. We hope that you’ll continue to follow along. Feedback is always welcome as it helps us know what we’re doing right and what we can maybe do better.