New Year’s Day has come and gone, as has the time to be setting new goals and resolutions. This year, I intentionally let this day pass me by in an attempt to prove to myself that change can be done at any point in time, irrespective of some convenient window. Okay, maybe I’m lying just a little bit - I really did intend to get it together and hit the gym come January, but the easy excuse of having family still in town let me sink deeper into the couch as I let what will almost certainly be my last winter break as a student move on without much of anything being achieved. However, now that I’m back in school, I feel the drive to really set some goals and commit to them, hard.

In 2023, I embarked on a personal journey of listening to an album every single day. This endeavor expanded my musical horizons, but unfortunately, it went largely unchronicled and remains unshared with the world. Now, as a step toward sharing the music that shaped my year time around, I am excited to present ten albums that truly defined my 2024.

Now that I’m back in Washington for the foreseeable future, I’m excited to explore all that the state has to offer. This includes Mt. Rainier National Park, the United States’ fourth national park and one of three in Washington. A friend and I decided to tackle one of the more popular trails in the park, the Skyline Loop. It’s 5.5 miles round trip and sees about a rise of 1,700 feet in elevation. The stairs on the climb up to the Skyline Trail have a quote inscribed into them from naturalist John Muir in 1889: “… the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings.” I could see glimpses of what he meant, but, frankly, we did not go on a good day for pictures. It was very foggy, but it was still good to get our legs moving and some fresh air in our lungs.

Iceland is one of those mysterious corners of the globe to the average American such as myself, which is why I decided to visit with my mother following my graduation. We left on the final day of August on a direct flight from Seattle. Iceland is on Greenwich Mean Time, meaning an eight hour time difference that did not bode well with my inability to sleep on planes. After we landed at around ten in the morning on the first of September, we picked up our rental car and headed to Reykjavík. Thankfully, Iceland drives on the right side of the road, removing driving as one of the unpredictable variables that comes with travelling abroad. The biggest difference there was how narrow the roads were and kilometers per hour being the standard speed limit format. I would look down at the speedometer, see 100, and freak out for a second.

Wow, time really does fly. I feel like I’m only now finding my bearings since my previous post about Mount Lincoln - I have since moved from home to Edmonds to (at some point in the near future) Seattle, visited two national parks, and ventured out of North America for the first time to see the sights in Iceland. As soon as I have the opportunity to organize all my photos, I’ll be sure to expand on this post and create future posts on Mount Rainier and the scenes around Reykjavík. In the mean time, in the name of staying on a schedule, I thought I’d post this update.

A staple of Colorado’s outdoor culture is undoubtedly hiking 14ers, or the mountains that exceed 14,000 feet of elevation. Colorado has 53 14ers, California has 12, and Washington has 2 (Mount Rainier is definitely on the to-do list). I was approaching the end of my time in Colorado this summer and had yet to hike a 14er, so a buddy of mine and I decided to tackle Mount Lincoln, the 37th highest peak in North America.

After just over two months since graduating from the Colorado School of Mines, I find myself reflecting on my time in Golden. This post focuses exclusively on my academic endeavors, aiming to capture the ways in which I attempted to better myself given that concisely summarizing the entirety of my experiences is an impossible task. I considered discussing the interesting technical knowledge I now have under my belt; not only does that conversation fail to provide a sensible close to this era of my life, but it can’t provide you, the reader, with anything worthwhile. Rather, I wish to speak about one class I took at Mines in particular and why I consider it my favorite.