Insight into to my life before starting the Appalachian Trail.

I have been inspired to start documenting my life, and was finally motivated to write on April 28th at 2:52 AM. I am turning the page on a chapter of life in North Lake Tahoe. I am writing to you all in a place of liberation and intense feelings of freedom. I have recently graduated from Sierra Nevada College, got back from a Japan/Thailand adventurer with 14 friends, got lit at Coachella, and proudly became single. I have gone on a lot of adventures these last few months, but i need to tell you about my past so you can feel where i am going with ya’ll.

In 2011, i was a Psychology major who couldn’t regurgitate that much information onto the tests and struggled.(ADD?) I decided that Psychology was in everything, i was really just passionate about the subject matter. So, i quit school to become a successful entrepreneur. I started a “Video Sharing Network For Snowboarders” called Strap’d Up with my brother/friend Matt Inglis. We enabled kids to share videos and compete in monthly contests for cash and prizes.(It was like a youtube for snowboarding specifically).

The contests were our driving point to gain a following. This form of advertisement and relevance costed 20,000 dollars a year. We produced a lot of edits and ran the Strap’d Up Video Magazine. My partner Matt Inglis and I, connected with the snowboard community we loved through Strap’d Up. The business was ran as a project, instead of a ploy to make some money. We drove cross country right after launching the site from our home in Kings Beach, CA and moved to my parents manufactured home in Mount Holly, VT. We had the shittiest wifi ever for running a online based website. We had a pool table that helped pass time before even watching a video and approving it to the website. All of our edits where uploaded in the parking lot of Ludlow’s library, mostly at 2:30 AM. Strap’d Up was born on January 11th, 2011 and died in the fall of 2013. Matt Inglis and i realized that our time wasn’t worth the hustle for something that didn’t cater to our “atman” or higher self. Also we weren’t generating money in a oversaturated market where you scavenge for minute funding. I went to Tahoe in the spring of 2013, and never went back to VT to continue Strap’d Up. It was my baby, but living with your business partner and living a narrow life revolved around the internet wasn’t us. We decided to let Strap’d Up go, I wrote this to all of our viewers.

I continued working at a coffee shop in Kings Beach called Java Hut, and decided to go back to school.

I reenrolled with a very liberal artsy major. Interdisciplinary Studies Major of Outdoor Adventure Leadership, and Creative Writing. Wrote a ton of good papers that i am proud of and went on a lot of life changing outdoor adventures. Learned a whole lot of psychology and relational leadership skills. I could rant on about school, but i’m drunk and thats boring as fuck. The point of this article is that i’m done with school!! No one has gotten mad at me in weeks, because i am single!! and i’m starting the Appalachian Trail in 19 days!! Liberated, free, and so blessed the way Lems should be. :)

Thanks for reading! Got a lot more to say and a lot deeper to dive in with this keyboard. Stay tuned. Jah Bless.

“Pain Is inevitable, Suffering is Optional” Ghandi