My writing career evolved from my career as an educator. After majoring in geology at college, I moved to Moab, Utah, to be in my favorite geologic landscape and to work at a non-profit environmental field school, Canyonlands Field Institute. I taught and coordinated natural history programs for people of all ages for five years, followed by three years as an interpretive park ranger at Arches National Park. These teaching experiences fostered my desire to become an author because I saw writing as a better method to more widely share my passion for the natural world.
I was also a bit lazy and had gotten tired of lugging around a pack full of field guides so I decided to write my own. Not knowing how the business worked, I wrote most of the book, A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country, before finding a publisher. More than ten years later, it’s still in print. In 2013, there was a new, updated edition with many new species, corrections, and exciting insights plus Gloria Brown’s wonderful drawings.
Then my wife decided to go to graduate school and we ended up moving from Moab, county population of 2 people/square mile, to Boston, with roughly 19,000 more people in the same area. Those first six months weren’t very good. Where I had once traipsed through quiet sandstone canyons, surrounded by 1,000 foot tall cliffs of rock, I now walked through shadowy canyons created by buildings. Where I once hiked on desolate trails, I now crossed busy streets. For the first time in many years I felt disconnected from the natural world.
And then I noticed Boston’s buildings. Half-billion-year old slates butted against 150,000-year-old travertines. Metamorphic rocks interfingered with igneous rocks. Fossil-rich, sea-deposited limestones juxtaposed mineral-rich, subduction-created granites. Plus, builders had gone to the effort of cleaning and polishing these fine geologic specimens, making their stories that much easier to read. As I began to notice the stone in buildings, I found the geologic stories that could provide the connection I had lost to wildness. I eventually published these stories in my book Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology (2009/republished by University of Washington Press in 2019).
I have continued to be fascinated by the urban environment and continued to write about it from my hometown of Seattle, where we moved in 1998. This led to the following books: The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle (2005); Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (2015); Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City (2017/2nd Edition in 2025); and Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound (2021). I have also co-authored Waterway: The Story of Seattle Locks and Ship Canal (2017 with Jennifer Ott) and Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State (2023 with Elizabeth Nesbitt). My other non-Seattle/Puget Sound book is Cairns: Messengers in Stone (2012).
Since 2021, I have also published a weekly free newsletter on Substack. Titled the Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind, it’s about the human and natural history of Seattle, Puget Sound, and Pacific Northwest. Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Place, a collection of essays from the newsletter, will be published in 2025.