Even though I was born and raised in New Jersey, from the time I was in early high school  the mountains of the American West were calling my name.  It was within those mountains that my love of landscape photography was born... but the story does not start there.  I believe three events have led me down this path.

The Passion... Skiing

The first is my intense, undying love for skiing and everything that revolves around it and touches it in any way.  In the early 80's at age 11, my dad started me skiing at a tiny upside-down 300 foot hill in northern New Jersey.  It had one of everything - one double-chairlift, one t-bar, and one rope-tow (no tram though!).  After a trip to Killington, Vermont in the ninth grade, I got the chance to travel to Utah with my dad for the first time.  In short... nothing was the same after that.

The Event... Moving out West    

To be fair... to me... my wife Kim was warned long before our engagement that a move out west was inevitable.  After graduating from Rutgers College and spending three years in the "gainfully employed" workforce, we moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, leaving behind a good job and family and friends, in search of the never-ending powder day.  I worked part time in the rental shop at Brighton Ski Area which was a great job to meet people, get a free season pass and make at least a little cash but what it really did was allow me to ski 110 days that first season.  At this point I still had not picked up a camera yet.

The Influence... Meeting Howie Garber

Picking up hitchhikers is normally not something I'd recommend but in the Utah ski world it is almost a customary act of kindness.  On my way home from work late season I picked up two skiers at Jordan Pines midway down Big Cottonwood Canyon - they had just skied from Alta and needed a ride down to the valley to their car.   One of the guys was Howie Garber: an ER doctor, backcountry skier and a then pro-amateur photographer.

He needed some help managing his burgeoning photography business and I needed a job; with our similar interests, it seemed a natural fit  so we teamed up... briefly.  No sooner than a month or so into this part-time job I found myself at a crossroads, having to make a very difficult decision - do I work for Howie or  join the "real world" as a SAS programmer at a large financial firm?  While I loved the idea of working for him, my desire to provide for my family with a "steady" job won out.  My mindset was not in sync with photography so it passed me by at that time.  As fate would have it, that short relationship sparked my previously inert photographic desire.  It took a year but in the summer of 1996 I bought my first Pentax SLR and use Pentax almost exclusively to this day.

Since that summer, I have taken many thousands of images, many in the Wasatch Range surrounding the Salt Lake Valley and the mostly unknown Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah.  Having moved to Minnesota in 1999, I shoot in the Upper Midwest but always find time to travel west.  While my travels have led me to Alaska, California, Wyoming, Canada, South Dakota and Wisconsin, Utah remains my passion.

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Photo Credits:

   Me, jumping off cliff - Scott Jones

   Me, skiing Bald/Reids Saddle - Miro Micovsky

   Me, in deep powder in Wolverine Cirque - Miro Micovsky