Tales from the Trail
Embrace the Delays and Enjoy the Scenery
Eighteen hours into a twenty-hour road trip from our door to Yellowstone's South Entrance, my high spirits tumbled at the sight of a sign. A happy-looking sign, it cast a shadow on my plan to get off the road and onto the trail as quickly as possible. It read: Expect...
Thriving in an Unfamiliar Life
My great-grandma was a woman of summer. She kept a garden. She grew the flowers and vegetables that graced her table. She picked the berries that topped our ice cream. Every once in a while, I helped her in the garden or the berry patch and it always shocked me when...
What We Already Know About Navigating by Faith
Leaving the comforting bustle of the crowd, I stepped off the boardwalk onto the geyserite-strewn path. This was my first solo hike. I was leaving from the Old Faithful area, where I lived and worked, to make a six-mile round trip journey to a backcountry waterfall....
One Truth for Navigating Unfamiliar Terrain by Faith
From the trailhead, the narrow, uneven path took us up a short, steep incline between towering pines. The road below and the river beyond were visible between their trunks. Lodgepoles, their growing habits produced tall, straight poles topped by comparatively tiny...
Friday Field Notes | A Little Geography
One strange thing about the internet world is that I don’t actually know where many of you live. Oddly, though, because of this unfamiliar terrain we’re collectively navigating, I can probably pretty accurately guess that most of us are at home much more than usual....
Friday Field Notes | Good News When the News is Bad
My son is studying abroad this semester. In northern Italy. Until this week, I hadn’t heard much talk about northern Italy outside the context of his travel plans. Now it’s all over the news. He was supposed to start classes next Monday. On Monday of...
Friday Fields Notes | Light
In his book, For Everything There is a Season: A Sequence of Natural Events in the Grand Teton-Yellowstone Area, naturalist Frank C. Craighead compiles decades of observations of outdoor happenings into week-by-week entries. At least, they’re weekly entries between...
Three Small Steps for Walking by Faith
Twenty-three Decembers ago, my husband, our one-year-old son, and I moved to Pella, Iowa. When we were still in the shall-we-or-shall-we-not phase of the process, my dad mentioned that he thought that bald eagles wintered in that area. In a word, I was shocked. I’d...
Walking by Faith Through New Things
We set off, my family and I, into the high desert. Unfamiliar territory, it was marked by slot canyons and stark terrain. We were mountain hikers, more accustomed to treading over soft, tree-lined paths than through stony expanses. Trailhead signs warned that heat...
Do You Need to Turn Around?
It was one of the first hikes we took together, my husband and I. It wasn’t long—only a few miles, but the one stretch was steep. The descent wasn’t bad. The destination—a steel suspension bridge spanning a canyon in the middle of wilderness—was worth the trip down...
Fall Field Notes
Good morning to you on this fine autumn day! Today I’m doing something just a little different and sharing a few field notes, a gathering of what the landscape of life has been teaching me. If you have a moment to pause and ponder what the landscape of your life is...
Walking by Faith Through Tough Terrain
The first trail—as in, an unpeopled, into the wilderness, marked-by-blazes-instead-of-a-worn-path trail—I remember taking was to the petrified forest in Yellowstone. I was fourteen, with my family, on our second visit to the park, and we’d finally stopped believing...
Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Proverbs 4:26