Singing River Trail Archives - Steve Jones Great Blue Heron

Mooresville, Alabama Cemetary: A New Dimension to Life and Death in the Forest! [Volume Two]

May 14, 2025/in Updates /by Steve Jones

Note: I am flagging this photo essay as one of a sub-series that introduces the emerging Singing River Trail:

A 200+ mile greenway system that strengthens regional bonds and creates new health and wellness, educational, economic, tourism, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people and communities of North Alabama.

On March 8, 2025, at the request of local history buff Gilbert White, I visited the Mooresville, Alabama Cemetery as a group of a dozen friends of the 200-year-old graveyard (Madison History Association) cleared brush and storm debris. I snapped photographs and recorded brief videos to develop a photo essay with observations and reflections. I envisioned a tale of the multi-tiered web of life and death (Nature and Human) interweaving across this hallowed land, a permanent resting place for more than 100 deceased former residents. Volume Two looks deeply into the elements of interaction and overlap.

The story of Mooresville Cemetery encompasses several components:

The overlapping natural environment and human community over time and generations (https://stevejonesgbh.com/2025/04/08/mooresville-alabama-cemetary-a-new-dimension-to-life-and-death-in-the-forest-volume-one/).
A deeper view into the elements of interaction and overlap (This photo essay).
The macabre (and lighter) dimension of an old forested cemetery.
Another story along the fledgling 200+ mile Singing River Trail.

Entrance to the Mooresville Cemetery:

The cemetery adjoins Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge. Its dense forest and the graveyard are nearly indistinguishable except for the monuments and burial depressions.

Richard Martin, for whom the Richard Martin Rails to Trail in Limestone County is named, stands at the gravestone of his paternal great, great grandmother, who died 144 years ago. Richard’s linkage to this hallowed ground is blood-strong. This fine woman entered our Earth-bound domain only 13 years after the cemetery welcomed the remains of its first departing soul. Like the forest, the human community cycle is without end. I doubt whether any of today’s trees on site witnessed Nancy B. Martin’s interment!

During the course of my two hours at the cemetery, Richard’s niece applied a biological cleaning solution, which brought the engravings back to life!

Just as the face of the monument lost its definition and clarity, the forest is changing. Nothing in Nature is static. Forest definition and clarity sufficient to meet the aesthetic standards for a visually attractive generational cemetery demands human attention and ongoing routine and occasionally heavy-duty maintenance. From some angles, the aging hilltop forest hides its cemetery identity!

But still, the story is not entirely nor hopelessly subsumed. A colorfull flag marks the final resting place for a Confederate infantryman, his grave tended by volunteer Cindy Wallace.

I recorded this 58-second video at the tombstone of the Confederate infantryman:

The cycle of life and death plays out across the mammalian/amphibian interface. I wonder whether the green tree frog (Hyla cenerea) visits Mr. Oliver routinely. The Old Folks traded tales of reincarnation. Who are these Old Folks? Am I among them? I admit to appreciating the possibility that the good Confederate infantryman’s soul resides happily on the hallowed hilltop overlooking Limestone Bay and Historic Mooresville.

Some gravesite visiter a century or more ago probably planted lesser periwinkle to add everygreen freshness and growing-season color. The plant still persists on the shady forest floor and amidst the aging tombstones.

Its leafy vines climb into the moss skirt of a large oak.

Clumps of liriope and daylilly evidence loved ones brightening gravesites.

I recorded this 55-second video into the overgrown graveyard from the border with Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge, and showing naturalized gravesite ornamental perennials planted on and escaped from gravesides:

I identified two varieties of narcissus growing several hundred feet from the heart of the cemetery just inside the Refuge.

A multi-flora rose grows at the foot of this monument, hinting at the loving care and respect given the deceased. Mourners laid the occupant to rest in 1901. I wonder who remembers and cares today. Even the youngest of those participating in the service is no longer among us. Certainly not in body. Alfred Hitchcock would create a scenario where they do indeed persist in an alternative dimension among the fading tombstones and towering oaks.

Another decorative planting escapee, several patches of spirea persist, visually echoing memories across the twenty decades here at Mooresville.

The tree frog is not alone among the memories. A squirrel masterfully chewed its way into the rich meat of a cemetery hickory nut. The cycle of life is without end…as long as our sun shines, rains fall, and Earth remains otherwise inhabitable.

As I said at the outset, the story of Mooresville Cemetery encompasses several components:

The overlapping natural environment and human community across time and generations.
A deeper view into the elements of interaction and overlap.
The macabre dimension of an old forested cemetery (stay tuned).
Another story along the fledgling 200+ mile Singing River Trail.

I developed this Volume Two of my Mooresville Cemetery tale as A deeper view into the elements of interaction and overlap.

Coach Jim Valvano directed the 1983 NC State University mens basketball program to the NCAA National Championship. Several years later, succumbing to terminal cancer, Jim delivered powerful motivational speeches across the country. He extolled three recommended essential elements of every day well lived:

Laugh heartily.
Think deeply.
Feel something to the point of tears.

The green frog delivered an element of mirth, even if not belly-laugh worthy. All else about the morning on-site and since then as I’ve organized my thoughts and reflections demanded deep thought. Misty eyes and a few keyboard drops accompanied my reflections on my own mortality and my regrets for not knowing my antecedents more intentionally. Although I seldom (Never, as I recall!) turn to Janis Joplin for philosophical guidance, she hit the mother lode with a line from Me and Bobby McGee:

I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.

Nature reaches far into my heart, soul, body, mind, and spirit.

The Nature of the Singing River Trail

The Singing River Trail will be a 200+ mile greenway system that strengthens regional bonds and creates new health and wellness, educational, economic, tourism, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people and communities of North Alabama.

The SRT is headquartered just two miles west of the cemetery. The trail will prominently feature Mooresville. As a lifelong devotee of hiking/sauntering, running, biking, and Nature exploration, I envision another Great Blue Heron weekly photo essay series focused on The Nature of the Singing River Trail. I will incorporate individual essays into my routine Posts that total approximately 450 to-date (archived and accessible at: https://stevejonesgbh.com/blog/). I offer these photo essays related to the Mooresville Cemetery as the beginning of the new component series.

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

Nature reaches far into my heart, soul, body, mind, and spirit.
The cycle of life is without end…as long as our sun shines, rains fall, and Earth remains otherwise inhabitable.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

Note: Unless otherwise noted, all blog post images are created & photographed by Stephen B. Jones.

I am available for Nature-Inspired Speaking, Writing, and Consulting — contact me at steve.jones.0524@gmail.com

A reminder of my Personal and Professional Purpose, Passion, and Cause

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied by untold orders of magnitude:

Mission: Employ writing and speaking to educate, inspire, and enable readers and listeners to understand, appreciate, and enjoy Nature… and accept and practice Earth Stewardship.

Vision:

People of all ages will pay greater attention to and engage more regularly with Nature… and will accept and practice informed and responsible Earth Stewardship.
They will see their relationship to our natural world with new eyes… and understand their Earth home more clearly.

Tagline/Motto: Steve (Great Blue Heron) encourages and seeks a better tomorrow through Nature-Inspired Living!

Steve’s Four Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit), and Dutton Land & Cattle: A Land Legacy Story (2025) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature. All four of my books present compilations of personal experiences expressing my deep passion for Nature. All four books offer observations and reflections on my relationship with the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

I love hiking and exploring Nature
I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
I don’t play golf!
I do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grandkids, and all the unborn generations beyond
And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future

Winter Dormant Season Wonders in a Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge Bottomland Forest

May 7, 2025/in Updates /by Steve Jones

Note: I am flagging this photo essay as one of a sub-series that introduces the emerging Singing River Trail:

A 200+ mile greenway system that strengthens regional bonds and creates new health and wellness, educational, economic, tourism, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people and communities of North Alabama.

On the morning of February 8, 2025, as I frequently do, I wandered through the bottomland hardwood forest along HGH Road in the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge near the border between Limestone and Madison Counties. I desired only to see what of deep dormant season interest might lie hidden in plain sight. Mission accomplished!

Spiraling Oddities

HGH Road is gated during the winter at the gravel parking area along Jolly Bee Road. I walked the one-half mile west to where an old farm lane drops south toward the Tennessee River. Yes, an old farm lane. I believe the bottomland forest was in agricultural production when TVA purchased the land scheduled for Lake Wheeler inundation and the adjoining upland property 90 years ago. I restricted the morning’s sauntering mostly to hardwood-dominated forests. I found this spiraled mid-canopy elm, back-dropped by a stand of loblolly pine, at roadside before I reached the now heavily forested farm lane.

I have never seen a tree that spirals of its own accord absent a directing force, which in this instance is no longer present. Imagine the elm when younger and smaller, wrapped in full spiral embrace with a supplejack vine. The supplejack species spirals upward clockwise as evidenced by the permanently spiraled elm. In effect, the growing tree prevailed, literally crushing life from the vine…a death spiral.

Leonardo da Vinci offered insight to seeing, questioning, and understanding such phenomena:

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo would have appreciated my seeming aimless traipsing. Albert Einstein, too, would have approved:

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Nearby a supplejack co-spiraling with a 3-4″ sweetgum tree offered more direct evidence, the vine still visible at left. The photo at right below shows the same supplejack vine closer to the ground, where it emerged victorious in its embrace of a sapling long since dead and decayed. The clockwise-spiraled vine remains intact. However, I don’t think it will survive its mutual grasp with the sweetgum.

I recorded this 58-second video of entanglement:

Infrequent sylvan visitors believe our forests are stagnant, timeless, never-changing. I recall asking workshop participants their perceived age of the mature hardwood forest we were visiting. Answers ranged from hundreds of years back to the time of Christ. Most of our northern Alabama hardwood forest are 80-100 years old. Nothing in Nature is static, absolutely nothing.

Death and Decay in the Forest

Life and death define the forest. The carbon cycle is the symphony, an elaborate ecological composition. Movements surge and flow across days, months, years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This ancient oak, with its decayed see-through base, rises to a snag. Gravity will soon prevail; decomposers will return its organic matter to the soil, which in turn will cycle its energy to new life, perhaps to an oak tree or a millipede, a rattlesnake, or a woodland spider lilly!

Here is my 58-video tour of the snag:

I prefer short quotes from sage conservationists like da Vinci, Muir, and Leopold. However, the lyrics and music of some timeless poets and musicians shaped my life, Johny Cash among them. Lyrics to his classic The Highwayman stand as a metaphor for the forests I know, whether Alabama, Alaska, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or any other of the places I’ve lived or roamed:

I was a highway man along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five
But I am still alive

I was a sailor, I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide
I sailed a schooner round the horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still

I was a dam builder
Across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around, I’ll always be around
And around and around and around and around

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I’ll be back again, and again
And again and again and again and again

I understand the co-spiraling signature of tree and vine. No mystery there. Explaining the spiral wood grain of individual trees eludes me still. Search “spiral grain” on the blog page of my Great Blue Heron website. You’ll see prior posts where I have probed the subject, all to no avail or conclusion, yet I frequently see dead hardwood trees with sloughed bark, clearly spiral-grained, taunting me to discover their secret!

I recorded this 48-second video of a nearby snag adorned with multiple scars of death and decay, as well as evident spiral grain.

A still photo of the same tree highlights advanced decay that suggests that undefeated gravity will soon triumph.

Commercial television these days offers all manner of cosmetic and pharmaceutical treatments for dry, crepey, warty, sagging, and blotchy skin and flesh. Thank God trees possess no such vainglorious tendencies! I recorded this video of a snag carrying its blemishes beyond death and decay.

Stills from of the same tree memorialize its countenance.

Every tree has a story to tell. These weathered individuals express volumes!

Beauty is Far Moore than Skin-Deep

Fungi infect all the prior dead individual trees I’ve included so far in this photo essay. Let’s now delve into the fruiting bodies (mushrooms) of the organisms whose hyphae are the actual within-wood decomposing fungi. Puffball mushrooms signal hyphae hard at work.

I recorded this 60-second video of a wind-toppled oak heavily infected with Stereum:

Our north Alabama forest breezes, I am sure, are super charged with clouds of fungal spores. I imagine competing species of fungi rushing to the scene of a recent windthrow, armies of spores laying claim to square millimeters of surface on a multi-ton sylvan carcass. Down for less than a full year, this tree already bears thousands of saprophytic fungi mushrooms.

Life, death, decay, and renewal dance in symphonic splendor.

A hefty lumpy bracket mushroom clings to a downed oak trunk.

Its underside is salting the air with countless spores catching the breeze to another multi-ton oak.

Bracket fungi are common throughout our north Alabama forests, especially in these fertile, productive hardwood bottomlands. I pledge to devote more time on future treks to identifying groups and species. So far only the edibles have merited my deeper attention.

I believe this is a latte bracket.

Fungi are biological wonders worthy of their own kingdom.

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding. (da Vinci)
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. (Einstein)
Life, death, decay, and renewal dance in symphonic splendor. (Steve Jones)

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

The Nature of the Singing River Trail

The Singing River Trail will pass through significant portions of the 35,000-acre Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge…perhaps not HGH Road per se, yet I know that Rockhouse Bottom Road along the Tennessee River, just two miles from HGH Road, will be a primary SRT route.

The Singing River Trail will be a 200+ mile greenway system that strengthens regional bonds and creates new health and wellness, educational, economic, tourism, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people and communities of North Alabama.

The SRT will prominently feature the Refuge. As a lifelong devotee of hiking/sauntering, running, biking, and Nature exploration, I envision another Great Blue Heron weekly photo essay series focused on The Nature of the Singing River Trail. I will incorporate individual essays into my routine Posts that total approximately 450 to-date (archived and accessible at: https://stevejonesgbh.com/blog/). I offer these photo essays related to my WNWR wanderings as the beginning of the new component series. Watch for more!

Note: Unless otherwise noted, all blog post images are created & photographed by Stephen B. Jones.

I am available for Nature-Inspired Speaking, Writing, and Consulting — contact me at steve.jones.0524@gmail.com

A reminder of my Personal and Professional Purpose, Passion, and Cause

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied by untold orders of magnitude:

Mission: Employ writing and speaking to educate, inspire, and enable readers and listeners to understand, appreciate, and enjoy Nature… and accept and practice Earth Stewardship.

Vision:

People of all ages will pay greater attention to and engage more regularly with Nature… and will accept and practice informed and responsible Earth Stewardship.
They will see their relationship to our natural world with new eyes… and understand their Earth home more clearly.

Tagline/Motto: Steve (Great Blue Heron) encourages and seeks a better tomorrow through Nature-Inspired Living!

Steve’s Four Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit), and Dutton Land & Cattle: A Land Legacy Story (2025) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature. All four of my books present compilations of personal experiences expressing my deep passion for Nature. All four books offer observations and reflections on my relationship with the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

I love hiking and exploring Nature
I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
I don’t play golf!
I do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grandkids, and all the unborn generations beyond
And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future

Mooresville, Alabama Cemetary: A New Dimension to Life and Death in the Forest! [Volume One]

April 8, 2025/in Updates /by Steve Jones

On March 8, 2025, at the request of local history buff Gilbert White, I visited the Mooresville, Alabama Cemetery as a group of a dozen friends of the 200-year-old graveyard (Madison History Association) cleared brush and storm debris. I snapped photographs and recorded brief videos to develop a photo essay with observations and reflections. I developed a tale of the multi-tiered web of life and death (Nature and Human) intersecting across this hallowed land, a permanent resting place for more than 100 deceased former residents. Volume One introduces the historic cemetery and sets the stage for the two succeeding volumes.

The story of Mooresville Cemetery encompasses several components:

The overlapping natural environment and human community over time and generations.
A deeper view into the elements of interaction and overlap.
The macabre (and lighter) dimension of an old forested cemetery.
Another story along the fledgling 200+ mile Singing River Trail.

I’d like you to please watch for subsequent Great Blue Heron photo essays (The Nature of the Singing River Trail) I will feature as whistle stops along the fledgling 200+-mile trail.

I viewed the burial ground as a provocative subject. The town is historic:

Historic Mooresville, Alabama is the first town incorporated by the Alabama Territorial Legislature, on November 16, 1818. The entire town is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is one of Alabama’s most important and intact villages. Historic homes and buildings, gracious gardens, and tree-shaded streets make a visit to Mooresville seem like a step back in time.

I beamed myself back to 1822, when the first documented burial took place on the grassy knoll three hundred yards southeast of the town. Young trees grace the heights, still too young to cast shade over memorial services. Albert Einstein granted me the means to travel back two centuries:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

I often speculate in these posts about the past from reading today’s forests. Borrowered from an online file, this image depicts the Mooresville Cemetery site as I picture its grassy knoll 200 years ago.

This monument welcomes visitors today. The background trees are not leaning to the south (left); I tilted the photograph to righten the leaning stone.

The crew labored for two hours. Their work made a dent in restoring order to a sunny hilltop long ago captured by time and a relentlessly advancing forest.

I often observe in these photo essays that life and death are constant, cyclical companions in our forests. Humans have added an overlapping dimension of life and death to the cemetery hilltop. The forest tells its own story. Each tombstone, every unmarked rectangular depression, and every echo of human memorial service, graveside visit, and fading memory, jubilation, and grief combine to reach across the two centuries. I felt the presence of others as I criss-crossed the knoll.

I wondered whether this fallen shagbark hickory bore witness to teary-eyed ceremonies, grieving loved ones, and soothing spring mornings.

I recorded this 57-second video of the uprooted tree:

I’ve studied our northern Alabama forests enough to know that neither the red oak (left) nor the shagbark hickory (right) witnessed the first 70-90 years of burials. They most likely were no more than seedlings or saplings when Wheeler Dam engineers closed the gates that flooded the adjacent Limestone Bay in the 1930s.

How many interred former Mooresville bones did this crashing oak rattle when it succumbed to undeafeated gravity?

What manner of disturbance did this decades-old hickory tree lightning blast create among the lingering spirits? Resident squirrels and other critters relying upon tree cavities celebrated as fungi infected and enlarged the wound and the tree survived the electrical insult. Life and death hand in hand — the cycle of renewal and demise persisting!

The cavity the critters appreciated served for how long…before the hollow they valued yielded to forces beyond the woody rind’s ability to hold the tree aloft?

Maria Rakoczy, The Madison Record news writer, worked feverishly with loppers across an area dominated by flat monuments.

Imagine the cleared summit view northwest into Mooresville (left) and southwest into Limestone Bay (fed by Limestone Creek, Mooresville Spring, Piney Creek, and Beaverdam Creek) two centuries ago. Mooresville’s checkerboard streets, homes, the brick church belltower, and the 200-acre Bay would have been visible, unobstructed by the invading forest. Today only the deep dormant season allows a glimpse without imagination.

I observe often that every tree and each forest grove has a story to tell. The tales told at the Mooresville Cemetery are overlain by layers of deep memories and generations past.

I recorded this 59-second video of a poignant, heart-rending tombstone message:

Margaret Alice Morris’ engraved tombstone (An angel visited the green earth and took the flower away) occupied a grassy hill (now a closed-canopy forest) above Limestone Bay.

As I said at the outset, the story of Mooresville Cemetery encompasses several components:

The overlapping natural environment and human community over time and generations.
A deeper view into the elements of interaction and overlap.
The macabre dimension of an old forested cemetery.
Another story along the fledgling 200+ mile Singing River Trail.

I’ve taken us through chapters one and part of two. I’ll begin Volume Two where this one ends.

The Nature of the Singing River Trail

The Singing River Trail will be a 200+ mile greenway system that strengthens regional bonds and creates new health and wellness, educational, economic, tourism, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the people and communities of North Alabama.

The SRT is headquartered just two miles west of the cemetery. The trail will prominently feature Mooresville. As a lifelong devotee of hiking/sauntering, running, biking, and Nature exploration, I envision anew Great Blue Heron weekly photo essay series focused on The Nature of the Singing River Trail. I will incorporate individual essays into my routine Posts that total approximately 450 to-date (archived and accessible at: https://stevejonesgbh.com/blog/). I offer this essay as an orientation to the new series.

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

Life and death sustain a natural forest over time; a human cemetery within adds deeper complexity and layers of sentiment, emotion, and memories.
Natural processes overtake all traces of human habitation in the absence of intervention and maintenance. Even a north Alabama graveyard yields to forest.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. I saw an aging forest and felt my own mortality, yet embraced the comprehension of both.

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

Note: Unless otherwise noted, all blog post images are created & photographed by Stephen B. Jones.

I am available for Nature-Inspired Speaking, Writing, and Consulting — contact me at steve.jones.0524@gmail.com

A reminder of my Personal and Professional Purpose, Passion, and Cause

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied by untold orders of magnitude:

Mission: Employ writing and speaking to educate, inspire, and enable readers and listeners to understand, appreciate, and enjoy Nature… and accept and practice Earth Stewardship.

Vision:

People of all ages will pay greater attention to and engage more regularly with Nature… and will accept and practice informed and responsible Earth Stewardship.
They will see their relationship to our natural world with new eyes… and understand their Earth home more clearly.

Tagline/Motto: Steve (Great Blue Heron) encourages and seeks a better tomorrow through Nature-Inspired Living!

Steve’s Four Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit), and Dutton Land & Cattle: A Land Legacy Story (2025) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature. All four of my books present compilations of personal experiences expressing my deep passion for Nature. All four books offer observations and reflections on my relationship with the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

I love hiking and exploring Nature
I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
I don’t play golf!
I do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grandkids, and all the unborn generations beyond
And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future