Photo Book The Regular Life. This book is based on Alex’s 2018 thru-hike of the Hayduke Trail, but it goes much deeper than that. The hike is a metaphor for life. It inspires lessons and perspectives that we can incorporate into “regular life” to put us on a path of growth.

The Hayduke Trail is an 800-mile hiking route across the Colorado Plateau. It starts in Arches National Park in Utah, winding its way through remote canyon country. The trail dips into Arizona to go through the Grand Canyon and ends in Zion National Park. There is no trail most of the time and the terrain is harsh and unforgiving. It’s considered by many accomplished hikers to be the hardest long-distance hike in the country.

Photo Book The Regular Life.

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Photo Book A Hiker’s Philosophy is a book that can serve as a nice coffee table book to flip through, or you can spend more time on the stories to go in-depth into the philosophy that long-distance hiking provides.

It has been years since I hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail (PNT), and I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about it. People say things like, “Wow that must have been fun.” Or “I wish I had time to do that.” They look confused when I can’t give them a simple explanation of what it was like. After all, it was just a three-month-long hike. I wish I could parse it down into a small conversation, but a lot can happen in three months. I designed this book to try and answer that question in a small coffee table book. A Hiker’s Philosophy is a book that you can flip through quickly or slowly contemplate.

Photo Book A Hiker’s Philosophy, get it today!

It took two years to process the events of those three months in 2015. I have begun to extract the meaning from it all and made it accessible for anyone interested in learning some of the lessons I did without actually hiking 1,200 miles. There are a lot of metaphors found in the wilderness because that’s our original home. I’ve found that what works out there, works in modern society. Things are just more complicated in regular life compared to trail life, but the rules are the same. That’s when I realized the hiker’s philosophy could be applied to things off the trail. To navigate regular life successfully, you need something much more abstract than a map. You need a properly calibrated perspective, and that’s what I found on the PNT.

Don’t like reading? Alex made a movie about the PNT too! A Sense of Direction: a 1,200 mile walk on the Pacific Northwest Trail.

For more information on the PNT visit, https://www.pnt.org/

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Photo Book Cultivating Intent. Going to school in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was a transformational period for me. I went to Northern Michigan University where I discovered my passion for nature photography, so naturally, I spent a lot of time hiking in this remote area. It started as small and infrequent hikes with friends. Eventually, I was hiking for many hours almost every day. I tried to find a new place to go as much as possible so I left the trails and began to find very secluded areas. I always had my camera with me and I took over 100,000 photos during my time there. They were narrowed down to about 400 to go into this photobook, Cultivating Intent.

After countless hours in the woods, I found a lot more than just pretty scenes. I found a metaphor for understanding life itself. The woods in the UP are a beautiful but harsh environment. They taught me how to be tough while still taking the time to stop and enjoy the scenery. At first, the harsh conditions would turn me around and send me home, but the more time I spent out there the more I developed the skills and the mental fortitude to deal with the cold, the rough terrain, and the bugs. Especially the bugs.

Get Photo Book Cultivating Intent today!

I began to enjoy the challenge that the woods presented instead of dreading it. It was a fundamental change of perspective that allowed me to find a lot more enjoyment in the woods. It wasn’t long before that perspective spilled over into my regular life outside of the woods. I realized that the woods could serve as a metaphor for how to get the most out of life too. Cultivating Intent is a photobook about the woods in the UP, but it’s also about finding something you enjoy so much that it gives meaning to life and serves as a metaphor for how to live it.

Check out my next book here, A Hiker’s Philosophy.

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