Why GlassMountains?

On this personal website I share some of my outdoor interests, trip reports, and ongoing plans with my family and friends, and organize my future explorations.

I had the good fortune to have spent most of my life in the Pacific Northwest of USA. Here I discovered the joy and obsession of hiking and climbing in the Cascades Range and other mountain ranges in the Western United States.

My summer home is in the Deschutes Basin of Central Oregon. The young High Cascades volcanoes lie to the west. The recent Newberry Volcano on the west end of the active Brothers Fault zone lies to the south. The older rhyolite domes and vents of Powell Butte and Smith Rock State Park lie to the east and north, respectively. My home is surrounded by lava flows, cinder cones, calderas, and volcanoes, and is built upon basalt flows in a shrub-steppe environment.

Nearby lava flows are rich in obsidian, a dense and typically black volcanic glass used by many native cultures to make arrowheads and blades, and pumice, a light, porous volcanic rock that consists of a network of gas bubbles frozen amidst fragile volcanic glass and minerals.

My winter home is in Southeast Arizona from where I explore the peaks of Arizona and beyond. Some of the many nearby mountain ranges were formed of ash flow tuff from volcanic eruptions.

Since I have visited so many glassy mountains, it seemed natural to adopt "glassmountains" as my website domain.

South Sister, Oregon

Cabeza Benchmark, Arizona

Denali, Alaska