This summer, we’ll be traveling to Hawaii with Aimee’s family, and with that trip, I will have visited all fifty states in the country. Being born in Alaska proved to be an advantage in the endeavor; it knocks out a tough one for many people and makes traveling long distances a routine part of life.

To commemorate my fiftieth state, I’ll be posting a photo and story from the other forty-nine every few days before we get to Maui in June. I don’t remember the exact order (besides numbers one and fifty), but I’ll do my best to put them in some sort of order, and to remember something interesting about each. The photos I post won’t necessarily show the first time I visited, or represent the quintessential experience of that state, but I’ll try to find some interesting ones.

Since I don’t have access to the treasure trove of pre-college photos at home in Alaska, the majority of the images I use will be either from the digital era (for me, 2001-present), or from the 1997 cross-country road trip I took with George, which was responsible with knocking off more than a dozen states throughout the south and midwest I’d never been to before.

So, here goes:



What to say about Alaska? It’s the state where I was born, where I was raised, where I’ve lived the longest, and it’s the place I still call home. As hard as it is to find a photo that represents any of the states for the purpose of this project, it’s pretty much impossible to choose one image to stand for all of my experiences and memories of Alaska.

A photo of my family, in the outdoors, is as close to epitomizing Alaska as I can get, I guess. This photo was taken the last time the four of us were in Alaska together, in the summer of 2003. I sort of wish I were in the photo, but someone had to take it… We’re all down in Seward, for my dad’s annual running of Mt. Marathon, staying at the bed and breakfast in Moose Pass, skipping rocks in the river. It’s always great to go home again.