Origin Story
Southern California kid.
Wyoming by choice.
Charleston by mastery.
I grew up in Southern California dreaming about the West. I'd get my copy of Field & Stream and Outdoor Life and read about ridgelines and rivers I'd never seen. I carried a pocket spiral notebook trying to track deer scrapes and creek crossings — until the rain destroyed it. I figured there had to be a better way.
When I moved to Cheyenne as a teenager, I had access to public land for the first time in my life — but no one to teach me what to do with it. So I taught myself. How to fly fish. How to shoot a bow. How to gut a buck. How to reload bullets and build my own arrows. How to pull a trout out of a heavy-flowing river. I became obsessed with the outdoors the same way I'd later become obsessed with technology: identify the gap, fill it yourself.
I landed a job at the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, driving out into the boondocks in a state vehicle to support game wardens who only came to town to get groceries. Nobody there knew how to do the things that needed doing — so I learned. Transform files for Office 2000. Network infrastructure. Then I started writing software to support the routers. Then an entire platform for the state's Chronic Wasting Disease program — from specimen harvesting at hunter check stations all the way through the lab to a web page where a hunter could enter their license number and see their test results. All from scratch. That's where I found my real passion: not the technology itself, but what the technology could do for people in the field.
Before onX existed, I built an Android app called Outdoor Journal. Location-aware. Camera-integrated. Weather data overlaid on maps. A web companion for offline research. Harvest logs, fish reports, scrape photos pinned to coordinates. I used it in the field. I tried to raise funding. What I lacked was time — I'd rather be in the woods using it than trying to sell it. The market eventually caught up. I understand those apps from the inside out, because I lived the problem before the solution existed.
I moved to Charleston to master a new frontier: the sea. I earned my USCG 25-Ton Master Captain license. I fish offshore, inshore, and with a fly rod. I fly a plane over the Lowcountry and look down at the water I fish. I'm collecting merit badges in the middle chapter of my life — working on my scuba instructor cert, my CFI, my next captain's license — because the call of the wild doesn't retire.
