You cannot stay on the mountain forever. You have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

--Rene Daumel, Mont Analogue

Some time ago I realized that as a mountaineer, photographer and writer I would always be an amateur. A few brushes with professionalism convinced me that turning my hobby into my job would drain the joy out of it. I have enjoyed on occasion sharing my mountain experiences with others through teaching, slide shows and articles. When I was younger I was inspired by picture books by climbers like Bob and Ira Spring, Tom Miller and Gaston Rebuffat. But with a busy family life and engineering job I doubted I would ever publish a book like the ones I used to daydream over. Enter the Internet--the ultimate vanity press. Cheap, worldwide distribution, and a good hobby for the evenings after the toddler has gone to bed. This gallery contains a lot of my own work, but I hope to gather from other sources material that brings some of the light of the mountains to the "lower regions" where we live. The Alpenglow Gallery is dedicated to Steph, for her love and enthusiasm, and Tom, who will inherit the light.