About this Website

I had the good fortune to spend most of my life in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. Here I discovered the joy and obsession of hiking, climbing, skiing, and bicycling in the Cascade Range and other mountain ranges in the Western United States.

On this website I share some of my trip reports, photographs, and explorations with my family and friends.

Why GlassMountains?

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 select "glassmountains" as my website domain.

South Sister, Oregon (2009)	Vista Butte, Oregon (2011)
Denali, Alaska (1996)	Cabeza Benchmark, Arizona (2019)