Your Yellowstone Guide
helping you map out your YNP adventure
+ encouraging you to navigate life by faith
If you want to visit Yellowstone someday–whether in person, online, or through the pages of a book, you’re in the right place.
If you’d like some guidance as you plan your Yellowstone adventure, you’re in the right place.
If you’d like some encouragement to navigate the ups and downs of everyday life by faith, you’re in the right place.
I’m Natalie and I’m glad you’re here.
Let’s go to Yellowstone.
Recent Posts
Where to Picnic in Yellowstone: Our 5 Favorites
Because I promote picnicking as the best way to deal with the inevitable and recurring need for food, here are some YNP picnicking realities and a few of our favorite picnic areas. (Note: Each is near water—either beside a river or above Yellowstone Lake.) Our 5...
Navigating by Faith When We’re Disoriented by Life
At the switchback, I paused for a breath and surveyed the landscape. Interested as I was in the spruce and fir trees dotting Lamar Valley’s faded grass, what I really wanted was to see how far my husband and I had come so I could figure out know how much further I had...
Our Seasons Aren’t As Simple as They Seem
Summer’s green is wearing thin. Before long, it will give way to the colors of autumn. Between the arrival of unrelenting heat and a steady green march across the lawn, some years it seems we go straight from winter to summer without stopping for spring. This doesn’t...
Gifts & Graces | Summer 2022
For more years than I care to admit, July 1 has settled in with a heavy sense of loss. Summer, I believed, was almost over. This is as unhelpful as it is untrue. How can a season that was born just days before be nearly at its end? Maturity is teaching me to take on...
Gifts and Graces | Spring 2022
One practice I use to keep me oriented to the features of the landscape of my life is to list the season's gifts and graces. It's a simple way to fix my eyes on the good so I can do my part to foster a hopeful perspective and healthy mindset. The list is intended to...
One Way We Find Our Way
“This way, Babe.” Late the night before, my husband, J, and I had checked into a hotel in Nebraska. Now it was morning, time to resume our road trip. I stepped out of our room and turned to the right, which, apparently, was wrong. “Really?” I asked. I was sure this...
How We Build Strength for Tough Times
“It’s easier if you walk along the edge,” my husband said. We were taking on unfamiliar terrain. I knew how to hike the packed dirt trails in the midwest and the mountains. But in Utah’s high desert where my KEENS tossed up a spray of sand with every step? Not so...
Winter Gifts and Graces
Of the practices I use to foster a hopeful perspective and healthy mindset, keeping a list of the season's gifts and graces is the simplest. Somewhere along the line, I started rearranging it into a bell shape and now I can't really stop. This season's gathering of...
Now is Not the Time to Wait
Every winter, I direct a troupe of middle and high school actors. From the very first year, there has always been that rehearsal. If you have ever worked with a group of kids, you know what I mean: mass distraction, constant talking, and management issues of all...
Gifts and Graces | Fall 2021
I have a long history of believing the way it is today is the way it always will be. This is especially true when I find myself traveling tough terrain but it spills over into easy stretches, too. Maybe you can identify. As a mindset, it doesn’t serve well. It...
Choosing an Adventurous Life
Two Octobers ago, I paused on the bank of the Gardner River and wondered just exactly why I would choose to be standing there in a swimsuit in twelve-degree air. We’d been there before–at least, my husband, two older kids, and I had. At that particular stretch of the...
One Easy Way to Miss Your Life
We walked out of the bustling hotel lobby into the stillness of a crisp mountain morning. It was the end of September, well into the annual elk rut. Gone was the previous evening’s circus of bull-horn-brandishing rangers trying to keep space between territorial bulls...
“There is a great deal of good to be learned from what we see every day, if we would but consider it.”
~ Matthew Henry