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A Year of Transition

It’s time once again to share my Top 10 photos of 2019. This year has been a year of change. Big change! This year has been focused on transitioning CrtrGrl’s and my life from the traditional 9-5 grind to a life with less things, less impact on nature, and more time.

After years of preparation, paying off debt, saving money and lowering our expenses, I walked away from my career. For the past 17 years, I’ve been working in an office with no windows in Orange County, CA, that came with a 130 mile round trip commute. It’s been an emotional transition, leaving the team I’ve enjoyed working with for almost half my life and the security of a steady paycheck. But we’re driven to do work that is meaningful and that will make a positive impact on the planet. And so we’re taking a leap…

Next, we left our beach-side home of Carlsbad Village in Southern California and followed my family to Northern California. Here in NorCal, we’re working hard to build out our skoolie, which we named Skoolie Woolie, and working on alternative ways of earning income. I’ve gone from driving ~520 miles a week for work to driving about 50 miles a week for grocery shopping and home improvement store runs. Life has a much slower pace, but we’re working just as hard as ever, investing in our future.

2019 Adventures

In 2019, we only took a few day trips and one major vacation for CrtrGrl’s birthday and as part of my transition out of working in an office. We decided to go big and go where we love, so in September, we went backpacking in Olympic National Park, WA.

We chose the lesser visited Staircase entrance along the Hood Canal. Over two days of backpacking, we hiked up the North Fork of the Skokomish River to the Home Sweet Home mountain valley camp area, with a steady rain and our clothes soaked through. It was amazingly beautiful. There we warmed up with the sounds of bugling elk serenading us to sleep. We spent another two days hiking out through many different lush mountain and forest environments.

Looking Forward

Looking ahead to the new year and new decade, we have a lot of plans that we’re really excited about! We’ll be starting to share more of the projects that we’ve been working on, including transitioning and restructuring Under Pressure Photography to our new Forest2Sea brand. More change is coming!

Top 10 Photos of 2019

And now my Top 10 favorite images of 2019 in roughly chronological order. Please let me know if you have a favorite!

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