Photography by Sue Birnbaum (unless otherwise indicated)
Ivins, Utah

Welcome to Explorumentary.com!   
This site is all about getting you out there on great hiking, backpacking, mountain-biking and snowshoeing adventures in the American West.   Each “explorumentary” post includes trip stats and photos as well as a bit of history and geology.   I’ve had many great adventures throughout 35 years of exploring the west - I feel we are enriched when we connect to the places in which we live and play by learning a little of the land’s history and nature.  

I am a Physical Therapist with a Geoscience degree and I like to express my love of nature through my photographs and adventure stories.  My husband Fred has the same enthusiasm and we have experienced over 23 years together exploring Idaho and America's West.

An awe-inspiring  trip to Jumbo Rocks campground in Joshua Tree National Monument in 1984 got me hooked on hiking the California deserts.  From the top of a granite boulder the size of a small house, I could see a wonderland of mountains, Joshua trees, cholla cacti, and creosote in all directions.  The desert became home and I fell in love with it; it claims a permanent place in my soul.  

As a Coachella Valley Hiking Club hike leader, I was co-creator of the Cactus to Clouds Challenge, a grueling hike that gains 10,300 feet in elevation to summit Mt. San Jacinto near Palm Springs, CA in one day. We hiked the first Cactus to Clouds Challenge in October 1993.  For more information: ​"Cactus to Clouds Trail" (Wikipedia).  

Sue and Fred at Sunset Peak Lookout, Boise National Forest

Summit of Mt. San Jacinto - First Cactus to Clouds Challenge - October 1993
(Roger Keezer, third hiker from left, created the phrase "Cactus to Clouds")

I met my husband Fred near the top of Mt. San Jacinto, a mountain squeezed up by the San Andreas Fault system.  We've had a great life in Boise, Idaho for 20 years.  We tackled Borah Peak, the highest in Idaho, and Hyndman Peak almost as soon as we set our feet on Idaho soil.  Each year we explore the sandstone mesas and canyons of Southern Utah, and hike peaks and canyons of southern Arizona.   We've had so many awesome adventures together and plan for many more.
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I have explored many places in the inland west, but of course not enough.  It’s a wondrous land of soft maidenhair ferns layered on canyon walls dripping with moisture, and thorny prickly pear gardens, of cold and windy sagebrush steppes and scorching hot dry lakes.  Of sand and boulder washes that change with storms where you can stumble upon ancient creek bed ripples preserved in sandstone.  It is a land that can be pleasant, and then turn scary in an instant.  It’s a place of rugged off-the-grid dwellers and urbanites.  In the west you can follow wolf tracks in the snow, and check out the wing markings of a golden eagle soaring above as you eat lunch on a mountaintop.  Get out there and sometimes you may be lucky enough to hear an elk bugle or a desert tortoise hiss, or talus tumble from the cloven hoof of a mountain goat.  It’s the fragrance of creosote after a soft rain, and the smell of the pinyon pine as you climb higher.  If you are reading this, you undoubtedly have your own stories of the west.  

Life is exploration.  We all explore in our own ways.  After 28 years in the physical therapy profession, I earned my Geosciences degree.  I have done Land Health Assessment and rare plant monitoring and worked as an interpreter at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.  The trials of exploring a career change have been a much greater challenge than exploring the land.  As Willa Cather, writer of the land and people in my native Nebraska said,  “The road is all, the end is nothing”.  
 
I hope to hear about some of your incredible adventures!
 
Thanks for visiting my site and Keep on Exploring!
 
-Sue Birnbaum

Lamoille Canyon near Elko, Nevada

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Palm Canyon in the Agua Calliente Indian Reservation, Palm Springs, CA
Mt. San Jacinto Wilderness in background