I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley (CA) about an hour outside Sequoia National Park (2 different entries). I spent many summers camping and backpacking in the Sierras (not just Sequoia National Park, but the Sierras in general, up and down, and hiked the White Mountains on the eastern side of the Owens Valley).
After getting my B.S. in Physics from University of California San Diego, I was a lead camp counselor at a YMCA camp just outside Sequoia National Park, where I had worked in the past, this team leading overnight hikes, wilderness hikes, and conducting boating and low ropes courses as well as participating in high ropes courses.
After that summer, I began teaching mathematics at junior high Bartlett Middle School, Porterville Unified School District), and then moved to teaching mathematics at a high school (Granite Hills High School, Porterville Unified School District). While teaching at GHHS, I raised test scores, was senior class advisor one year, which involved fundraising and organizing meetings, senior brunch, and grad nite, was assisted in school WASC accreditation, and assisted with several clubs on campus, one of them being the Outdoors Club. In that club, we recycled across campus to fundraise for camping and backpacking trips. One summer, we spent a week volunteering to do some surveying of pines infected with blister rust in the Golden Trout Wilderness area. I taught all levels of mathematics, including AP courses, for 6 years.
For the last two years, I have been working for the Ozark Underground Laboratory, Inc. in Protem, MO and assisting with projects for the Tumbling Creek Cave Foundation. Both the business and the foundation are headquartered on 2,900 acres of land in the Ozarks just a couple miles north of Bull Shoals Lake. The OUL is a dye tracing and groundwater remedies environmental company while the TCCF oversees the preservation of fauna in Tumbling Creek Cave, including maintenance, data gathering, invasive cray fish trapping, groundwater delineation projects, and giving conducting educational courses and workshops on karst, caves, geophysics, and ecological issues.
I have been across the United States, to southeast Asia, Mexico, Canada, Alaska, and Italy. My favorite places to visit are those least recognizable. I get my greatest thrills when visiting places that appear to be on another planet. Patagonia is one of those places and an area that may be of great environmental concern in the near future as global climate change plays out, affecting the most extreme latitudes the most (North and South poles). A trip to Patagonia would be both spiritual and scientific because I would begin to think about the ways in which flora and fauna may begin to see the next climatic effects due to human induced climate change.