Moving away from your hometown for the first time must always be an exciting and terrifying process. This I can say is especially true when you have no new home planned for living in upon leaving. In late summer of 2016, I left everything I had come to know about life in Lawrence, Kansas, my friends, family and girlfriend, to head out West on a photography internship with the Utah Conservation Corps. This was the first internship of this nature they had ever had and not even they knew what I should expect when I got out to northern Utah.
What came of this was an almost three-month road trip exploring and working in and out of Utah, living out of my Subaru Forester set up as a make shift adventuremobile. I traveled to 18 different states, driving over 21,000 miles and became one with the road and the West in the process. Driving down every highway and visiting every National Park I could were my new goals, marking off places on the map my obsession. These were not new ideas to me; I spent many hours traveling with my dad doing the same thing, however, this time I was all alone and it wasn’t for just a week. I experienced more then any one person has the right to in just under three months and it made me realize there is so much more out there that needs to be experienced.