FEATURED PROJECTS

In the fall of 2023, I met Frenchman Alain Robert in Paris, as he was preparing to illegally scale the side of Tour Hekla (722ft), the second-highest building in France. In his youth, Robert was among the world’s most talented free solo rock climbers, busting grade benchmarks and tackling many audacious climbs that have yet to be repeated.

Transitioning into a career in “urban” soloing in the mid-1990s, Robert has since climbed nearly 200 skyscrapers and urban landmarks around the world—from the Empire State Building to Taipei 101 to the Eiffel Tower—often illegally, and always without a rope.

Now 62, he shows no sign of slowing down, even after seven falls, two comas, and dozens of broken bones. As a contributing editor at Summit Journal, I spent time with Robert both while climbing in France and at his home in Bali, Indonesia, to pen a print profile for the magazine.

For five years I served as the lead writer for Valandré. This veteran French brand handcrafts down jackets, sleeping bags, mittens, booties, full-body suits, and other equipment for 8,000-meter expeditions and cutting-edge alpine climbs.

Valandré’s marketing style is at once thought-provoking, oddball, and irreverent, and in my role as lead writer I’ve concepted (and written copy for) countless imaginative print advertisements appearing in climbing magazines around the world, including Alpinist, Rock and Ice, Climbing, and Gripped.

I also revamped their website, pioneered several outlandish social media campaigns, and helped design product tags and accompanying merchandise. By clicking the button below, you can view a selection of full-scale PDFs of our hand-drawn advertisements, as well as other written work I’ve performed for Valandré, such as a fairy tale-esque brand origin story.

In 2019, I became one of the first people to hike the Juliana Trail, a new long-distance hiking route encircling Slovenia’s Julian Alps, and the nation’s only national park, Triglav. I spent 19 days traveling on foot alone through small mountain villages, exploring dilapidated castles and World War II bunkers, and sampling more than my fair share of local grappa. Along the way, I stumbled into an off-limits gold mine, was chased by a dozen shepherd’s dogs, shocked by two electric fences, and briefly placed in a Slovenian mental asylum while trying to find antibiotics.

My coverage of the Juliana Trail appeared in print and digital articles in a number of international magazines, including Outside and Travel + Leisure. You can click the link below to read a short digital piece I wrote about the experience for Outside Online.

In the final years of the motorcycle magazine Iron & Air’s existence, I was a regular contributor to their print and digital catalog.

My work included travelogues from my own adventure motorcycle trips in 20+ countries on five continents, op-eds about developments in the motorcycling industry, reviews and how-to guides on topics like motorcycle repair, camping, mountaineering, cold weather riding, and protective gear, and the occasional humor piece.

Iron & Air shut down in early 2023, and their website (and all of my digital work for the magazine) is now inaccessible. I’m currently in the process of re-uploading the raw text of these published articles to my website, but some may still lead to a 404. You can find a compilation of all of my motorcycle-related work by clicking the button below.

As a contributor to PeakVisor for the past five years, I’ve written dozens of articles about wilderness regions across the world. As part of PeakVisor’s initiative to serve not just as a mapping application, but a encyclopedic resource à la Wikipedia, my articles and research cover far more than a given destination’s mountains. They also offer an overview of the geography and climate, flora and fauna, and the geologic and human history of a region. They also offer readers a selection of the most popular trails or hiking objectives in the region, and an overview of the most notable cities, towns, or villages.

I’ve authored articles about everything from entire countries (Eritrea, Papua New Guinea, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Tunisia) to specific states or provinces (Hà Giang, Vietnam), to national parks and other protected regions (Gunung Leuser National Park, Indonesia, Reserva de Recursos Manejados Ybytyruzú, Paraguay, or Makalu-Barun National Park, Nepal).

I’ve also penned informational content on a variety of topics, such as How to Leave No Trace in the wilderness and How to Experience the Mountains by Motorcycle.

Coregami was created to solve a simple, but enduring problem. When performing classical music on stage, musicians need to look good, to conform to a standard set by centuries of tradition. But they also need to be able to move. They need to twist and stretch and sweat and perform, under hot stage lights, sometimes for hours on end.

Playing music is as much an athletic endeavor as it is an art, but traditional music attire doesn’t accommodate this. It’s stuffy and constricting, hard to pack, and hard to keep clean on tour. Enter Coregami, a brand that designs athletic-inspired apparel for the world’s most elite classical performers.

Coregami’s ambassador list reads like a “who’s who” in the world of classical music. From pianist Alessio Bax to violinist Stefan Jackiw to conductor Larry Loh to Scott Yoo, host of the award-winning NPR show, “Now Hear This,” I’ve profiled the best of the best for Coregami, sharing their lives on the concert stage, in the practice room, and away from their instruments.