My First Post

My first post will be basic background on where I have been, where I am at, and where I am heading. As you can obviously see I am quite passionate about the outdoors and particularly the Geosciences. I did my undergraduate research in a University in Utah called Weber State, where I had a fantastic staff of great professors. I tried to be as involved as possible, participating in an array of undergraduate research studies, and field trips. I exceled in my studies and graduated in May of 07' with a Bachelor's of Science in Geology. It was a memorable time for me and I will always look back at my studies there with great fondness. I feel I have made friends that will last through the ages. I was able to go to South America and participate in a conference in Mendoza, Argentina. I loved it down there, and would love to return one day. Durring this time period I got heavily involved in trail running and began to train at lunch with a good friend. I wanted to aspire to the Wasatch 100 mile endurance run and was on my way, when I was halted by surgery. I had Surgery in July of 2005 on most of my major organs. It was an interesting time in my life, and I most likely will blog about it later. This completely stopped any running and the recovery to 80% was about a year. In this time I finished my degree. I then started a company looking for mineral resources, using a process I created, to streamline the costly and lengthy exploration process. That story is quite a tangent that I will not delve into for this current post. I then decided to pursue graduate studies in Geology. I applied to Western Australia first, and was unable to come up with the funding and scholarships necessary to attend. I switched my focus to Canada do to the Great North's focus on Earth Sciences, and applied from east to west. My first choice, funny enough, was the school I got into. The University of Victoria. I preferred this school based on location, research opportunity, supervisor, and just a desire to attend. I made the move on August 18-20th. I packed up a U-haul and started a new adventure. It has been fantastic and challenging for many different reasons that I am sure will become evident through my blogs. Throughout all of this excitement and adventure I have had a strong reliance on music to be a soundtrack to my life. I have always loved Depeche Mode for reasons I will blog about later, but their music has been a huge back drop for many memorable events in my life. I am a complete "audiophile" and really love music. I enjoy many different genres, but tend to gravitate towards moody, bluesy, dark, electronic, and mixed electro acoustic bands. I have had many tangents along the way from punk to metal, but find myself continually going back to my 80's synth roots and bands that have sprung up as a result. These main themes will always be running throughout my blog and many will be inter-twined. I think this will be fun to force myself to get my thoughts together and work through some of my issues. That is the last 6 years of my life in a nutshell. I will try to include a photo or two along the way, to keep it interesting







This is a photo of a recent exploration trip in Utah's Uinta Mountains.