Though I grew up in New England, after a tour of duty with the U. S. Air Force that took me to Okinawa and Vietnam, I served my last assignment in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’d been there before, on a trip west with a good friend while I was stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi. His father was living in Henderson – just east of Las Vegas. That was my first taste and I wasn’t going to give it up once I made my way back.

I’ve lived in the Western United States since 1972.  My work with the research arm of the United States Forest Service includes studies in forestry, entomology, wildlife, range management and resource mapping.  I spent many years managing large data sets for one of those research teams, designing databases to hold the information, and programming applications to tap them.

That work gradually cultivated my keen interest in the ecology, environment, the people, and the economics of the Western interior. These pages chronicle my growing captivation with  and understanding of this region, the place writer Wallace Stegner called the native home of hope.