At Home
in Utah

Nowhere has ever really felt like home to me. Not in the way people mean when they say it.

The longest I’ve spent in one place is about ten years. And even those ten-year stints were broken apart — by living in more than one place at once, by traveling ten months out of the year, by the particular pull of whatever was next. I’ve never really stopped moving. I’m not sure I know how.

So when people ask where I’m based, the honest answer is complicated. Midway, Utah is where I land. It’s where the cabin is, where the mail goes, where I come back to. Honestly, I call it my dog’s house. Because if she wasn’t here, I’m not sure I’d keep coming back as often as I do.

The Heber Valley sits quietly in the mountains and just exists. The aspens go gold in October whether you’re watching or not. The light does extraordinary things over the Wasatch in the early morning and it doesn’t care if you have a camera. There’s something freeing about a landscape that doesn’t perform for you.

When I’m here, I fly. I’ll take my paraglider up to cloudbase and look out over the entire Wasatch from 18,000 feet — that view never gets ordinary. The Uintas stretch out to the east, massive and unhurried.

The desert is close. The mountains are closer. The ease of access to all of it, in every direction, is something I didn’t fully appreciate until I’d been away enough times to miss it.

I disappear into canyons. I find waterfalls that aren’t on any map I’ve ever seen and sit next to them longer than is probably necessary. I walk into aspen forests and stay until the light goes flat. These aren’t wasted hours — they’re the hours that make everything else possible.

I spend part of my year in Baja. I travel for work more months than not. The road is still where I feel most like myself, most alert, most alive to what’s in front of me.

But I keep coming back here.

Maybe that’s what home actually is, for someone like me. Not a place you never leave. A place you keep returning to. A place that holds something for you while you’re gone and gives it back when you show up.

I work with resorts, tourism boards, and brands across the American West — Park City, Deer Valley, the whole Wasatch corridor — and I bring the same eye here that I’ve taken to National Geographic expeditions and around the world. The difference is that I know this light. I know what this valley looks like at six in the morning in November. I know the specific color the sky turns over the Uintas before a storm.

You can’t fake that kind of familiarity. And you can’t buy it.

You just have to keep coming back.