I've been meaning to build this for months. Not the photos — those kept happening whether I planned them or not. The thing. The website, the place where all of it lives.
The putting-off wasn't dramatic. I was busy — traveling, meeting friends, prioritizing everything over this "hobby." And when I did sit down with it, it felt like it had to be perfect. So many versions. So many drafts of the design. I have folders of half-finished layouts that nobody will ever see, each one abandoned the moment it stopped feeling right.
Here's the part that surprised me: climbing the mountains and hiking the rivers were never the hard part. The hard part was everything after — organizing all the photos, editing, coming up with a design language I actually liked. The shooting is instinct. The archive is work.
What finally flipped
A few weeks ago we did Zion — the Narrows, camera held over the water — and then drove up to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. So many things happened on that trip. But the part that matters here: I got stuck at Point Imperial, with a storm moving across the canyon. So I set up and shot it — the canyon itself, and some still videography of the storm walking over the rims.
A guy standing at an overlook next to a massive tripod for hours makes people curious. New people kept coming up, and they kept asking the same questions. Do you sell these? Do you showcase them somewhere? Do you have a website?
And every time, I'm like — haha, no. Just a hobbyist. Been meaning to make a proper one. Just never got to it.
I heard myself say "never got to it" enough times at one overlook that it stopped sounding like an excuse and started sounding like a decision I was making over and over. I'd been carrying some of these photos around for months, thinking about doing something with them. Turns out the answer to "do you have a website" was just: not yet.
And then it took two days
That's the part that gets me. Months of circling it, and once I actually started, the whole thing took two days. Forty-eight hours from a folder of photos on a hard drive to all of this — the site, this journal, a design language that finally feels like mine.
There's a shop now too, and honestly, that's not really the point. If someone wants one of these frames on their wall, that makes me happy — but this was never about selling prints. It's about the photos. I wanted somewhere to put them that felt right. Now they're here.
The lesson I'll pretend I've learned
The mountain was never the work. Starting was. I'd like to say I've learned that permanently, but I know myself — I'll put off the next thing too. At least now, the next time someone at an overlook asks if I have a website, the answer is short.
The archive was always growing. Now it has a front door.