We’ve set a date for the end of this chapter of our lives and the start of the next.

When American Whitewater sent out an email that they were hiring a new executive director, my heart stopped. Talk about a dream job. The worst that can happen is they say no, right?

I have never seen such a crystal clear Milky Way. The dunes already made me feel like I was on a different planet, just Michael and me alone in the world. But now I felt close to systems thousands of light years away.

This whole place was way up on a mountainside and the valley we were overlooking below was the size of New Hampshire. You could see the Great Sand Dunes National Park from there, and it looked tiny. I remember thinking, That’s it?

A two-week trip was the perfect opportunity to ask, “If we were living in this van full time, what would we want to be different?” Unsurprisingly, we came up with a pretty daunting list of projects.

An abandoned quarry is an invitation. It scratches that itch of the human desire to explore. That desire to claim uncharted territory can draw a straight line back to Westward Expansion and lots of other unsavory conquests, but it’s there all the same.

Fear is every athlete’s best friend and greatest enemy. With too little fear, athletes get hurt. With too much fear, they never reach their potential. Dealing with fear is a balancing act.

Daylight was fading fast. As each minute ticked by, my worry rose. Come on Dakota, where the hell are you? “DAKOTA!!” I shouted into the dark. No response. Nothing. I could see down the tracks a ways. Just more snow, no footprints.

Maybe the snow at the top was impassable, maybe we’d need extra gear we didn’t have...I tried to put that out of my head and kept going. I had bigger things to think about. In a small leather pouch in my pocket, there was a ring.

In these times, it’s okay to feel sad about missing out on experiences you should have had. That doesn’t take away from the experiences you’ll have instead, or in spite of.

The world got flipped upside down and I kept waiting for it to right itself…but it’s me that needed to reorient myself to the world as it is now. This is what it feels like to live in a historic moment as it unfolds. This is the flash point. Whatever our society looks like after this, it will not be what it was before.

At 113 feet tall, Yahoo Falls is Kentucky’s highest waterfall. As a bonus, as we approached, I kept yelling “YAHOOOOOO!!!” at the top of my lungs, embarrassing the hell out of Michael even though no one else was around.

If you’re like me, you prefer not to treat a natural wonder of the wilderness like a theme-park spectacle. Let’s be real here, Old Faithful’s eruption is BIG. So you really don’t need to be that close to still appreciate the majesty.

Lessons learned on a first trip to the gym: You will get pumped! And in climbing, that doesn’t mean excited. It means you’ve overworked your forearm muscles, and now you’re a weakling with T-Rex arms.

Thirty definitely feels like a milestone. The kind that inspires friends and colleagues, both younger and older, to say (with somewhat apprehensive expressions) “How do you feel about turning thirty?”

Somehow, without ever having been in a whitewater kayak before, I drove 13 hours round trip in a single day from Kentucky to North Carolina and back, to pick up a bright green boat.