Lead Guide
Videographer
Forrest
The alchemist of granite & grace
"My images are not just documents of a place, but of a shared state of being. To witness the light together in the high country is to forge a union as permanent as the granite."—Galen Rowell
Foundational guide experience
The Guide’s Mind
I grew up in this country. My mother cooked for backcountry trail crews in the eastern Sierra; my father ranged those same mountains on foot before trading trails for rivers. I was twelve when I first rowed the Tuolumne River. I hitchhiked to trailheads as a teenager — just me and my dog Sally, gone for days at a stretch, back before Monday, if we were lucky. I guided Cherry Creek for years, one of the hardest commercially run whitewater stretches in the world.
I spent winters as a backcountry snowboarder and instructor, chasing storms from the Rockies to the Columbias to the Cascades. I’ve been disappearing into the High Sierra for 30-day solo stretches alone with my camera for longer than most people have been taking engagement photos in front of Half Dome. What I’m saying is: I know where the light falls. I know how to read weather moving over a ridgeline at 11,000 feet. And I know how to plan, pack, and prepare a trip to be successful.
"Thanks to the talent of Forrest's editing, everyone who sees our photos are blown away. In one picture, he somehow turned a day shot into a night shot with crazy editing magic!"
Our origin story
the Confluence of our lives
There’s a particular kind of conversation that only happens at altitude. The kind where the wind is doing half the talking and you’re not trying to fill the silence. Just moving through it together, learning how the other person breathes when the trail gets steep. That’s where Kira and I found each other. Not in a coffee shop. On the flank of the Matterhorn in the Sawtooth Ridge in the Sierra Nevada, packs loaded, neither of us entirely sure what we were walking into — the mountains or each other.
We’d been circling that question for a while, the way rivers circle a bend before committing. Then, one weekend out of Bridgeport, we shouldered into Horse Canyon, made camp, and summited together at first light. By the time we dropped back below tree line, something had shifted. We didn’t talk about it much, but our smiles gave it away. We just kept going back out.
A trust built not from declarations but from exposure — to weather, to beauty, to the particular rawness of being small in an enormous country.
Our adventure Love Language
From Wild Romance to Radical Business
A 16-day traverse deep into the southern high country of Yosemite. Solo boat descents of the Grand Canyon in winter — a month at a time, just the two of us reading water and canyon walls by firelight. Horse-assisted trips into the Emigrant Wilderness, our home range, where the granite is personal and the routes are ours. Trip by trip, a language developed between us. A shorthand for joy. A trust built not from declarations but from exposure — to weather, to beauty, to the particular rawness of being small in an enormous country, only now we were together.
Somewhere in all those trail miles and river miles and vertical feet, Natural Unions became inevitable.
Creative Specialist | Music Producer | Technical Director
life/adventure partners
photo + video team
Kira brings the romantic artist’s eye — that instinct for catching a glance before it becomes a confession. I bring the guide’s mind and the darkroom’s patience, shaped by years of chasing light in places that don’t forgive a wrong exposure. And then there’s the film — scored with original music, built from the actual sounds of the place where you said your vows.
What you take home won’t just document the day.
How we can help you
It will bring you back.
Backcountry Authority | Professional Witness | Media Director
