My new favorite way to camp!

 

I truly love this setup. Jeep Gladiator Rubicon with a James Baroud "Space" rooftop tent. I gave it a good test on my November trip to the southwest, and I have to say that it is so nice to not be sleeping in a tent on the ground anymore. Yeah, its a little bit of a pain to have to climb up and down the ladder to access the tent. But that is a minor thing compared to the benefits. 

I love waking up in the morning and opening the tent windows to a nice elevated view of the landscape around me. Never again do I have to worry about the tent being level... the off-road pitch-and-roll gauges in the Jeep's instrument cluster make leveling super easy. Never again do I have to deal with the tent getting dirty by being set up on wet/muddy ground. Perhaps the best thing, though, is how easy and fast it is to set up. It literally takes less than a minute to have the tent popped up and ready for use. Closing it up takes a little more time, but nowhere near as long as taking down and packing a ground tent. 

Being that its mounted to a Jeep Gladiator Rubicon, I can get to some pretty rugged, remote and awesome places that many other vehicles would struggle to get to, if they can get there at all. As I enter my 50th year of life on this planet, I never would have guessed that I would have so much fun discovering a new way to camp! Here's to many more adventures with the Jeep, James Baroud tent, and my camera gear. 

Ice Sandwich

 

Another ice photo from February, 2015, this one taken on Lake Superior near Hovland, MN. The layers and lines within this slab of ice made me thing of a sandwich. And the pyramid shape on top quite random and intriguing. Ice is endlessly fascinating.

Happy New Year!

 

Happy New Year everyone!  Here's to hoping that your year is packed full of adventures!

Moody Morning in the Frozen Forest

 

I'm working on a major overhaul of my image library, attempting to clean it up and simplify it, getting rid of redundant images, etc. In the process I'm finding a lot of photos that I never worked on and never did anything with, and this time around they're striking me in a way that they didn't before. This is the first of those. It's a photo from February 2015, taken at Tettegouche State Park on the Minnesota shoreline of Lake Superior. Tettegouche has large cliffs right next to the lake and when the conditions are right, high winds and large waves can throw spray well up over the top of the cliffs into the forest, coating every inch of every tree in a thick layer of ice. It's one of the most fascinating things, in my opinion, that occurs on Lake Superior. 

Utah Aurora!

 

From my November trip to the Moab, Utah area... the night of November 11th yielded some surrealistic skies over my campsite along the Colorado River. An incredibly strong aurora storm filled the sky with some super intense colors, colors unlike just about anything I'd ever seen before. I spent a few hours watching and photographing the sky... it was very hard to pull myself away to go to bed in the rooftop tent, but eventually I had to call it a night. This was at the start of my time in the southwest on this trip, and I couldn't have imagined a better beginning to what would become two weeks of awesome adventures!

My Favorite Morning - Autumn 2025

These photos are from my favorite morning of the 2025 autumn season. Fog blanketed the landscape on the morning of September 23rd, and boy did it sure make for some awesome images! There was also a brisk north wind, which meant the fog was rolling through rather quickly. The conditions made for an ever changing palette of photographic opportunity. The 2025 fall color season was an interesting one, as most are, and this day was definitely the high point of the season. 

The Beginning of the 2025 Fall Color Season

Here is a series of photographs that I made at the beginning of this year's fall color season. Taken on a morning where the fog added a ton of interest to the scenes laid out before me. These photos were made during the 3rd week of September.