I made a video about being present, Alex and I went camping for the first time since 2019, and Zion turned one year old!

Everything you need to know to camp in the Juniper Prairie Wilderness area of the Ocala National Forest, including parking information and trailheads, camping locations and helpful resources.

With a rare morning to myself, I kayaked a section of the Ocklawaha River and created a video of the adventure.

Alex and I kayaked to the La Chua Trail observation deck in Paynes Prairie Preserve and camped in a storm.

We drove to the Juniper Prairie Wilderness Friday evening with the goal of photographing white pond lilies beneath the glow of a rare “blue flower moon.”

There have been two trips that have definitively revolutionized our Juniper Prairie Wilderness project. The first was when we started bringing GPS devices to the woods. The second occurred this weekend.

This past weekend I did some time traveling. Not in the science fiction sense, where someone jumps into a DeLorean or a phone booth and leaps forward and backward in a dramatic attempt to rectify some injustice committed in an alternate timeline. No, my time travel was a little more tame than that.

They warn you about the bears. They warn you about the alligators. They warn you about the rattlesnakes and the water moccasins. But they never warn you about the two guys hauling an oversized bathroom mirror miles through the brush and the thicket into the wilderness. Probably best to stay clear of those two.

I grew up in Florida. My family moved here from Cape Cod when I was seven. But I’ve always seen Florida as an unfortunate circumstance, a stain left in the carpet of my parents’ old dreams. This is the second post of my Contact Sheets series.