Adventures With Candace Finale

Today is the final Adventures With Candace Blog. It was back on September 22, 2012 when the first one was published on Sierra News Online and in case you are wondering, it was about a hike up to Dana Plateau. The blog has come a long way since then with improved photography and mapping tools. Somewhere along the line, I made a goal for myself to do the blog for 10 years and now I am there.

Thank you to all of the SNO readers for reading and helping to make the blog better. Your ideas were integral, helping to make the information much more user friendly over the years. It would not have been what it is today without you.

Since this is the final blog, I thought you might like to hear some personal things about me such as how I got the adventure bug, along with my interest in history and what I plan on doing after the blog.

How did I get interested in hiking and outdoorsy things? You may know that I retired from CALFire, but the adventuring started long before that. My parents always took our family camping so I started at a young age. This pic of me with Mom and Dad was taken at deer camp when I was about a year old. I don’t know how my mom did it with us little kids.

 

Throughout the years we did a lot of camping and fishing.

And my family traveled, seeing all kinds of interesting places along the way.

 

 

Something as simple such as a Sunday bike ride along the Sutter Buttes was also a fun event. Look Mom, no hands!

 

And we had horses, cow, pigs, geese, chickens and dogs so we did things with them. A broken foot didn’t stop dad from riding in a parade with me.

I had some wonderful adventures riding our horses . . .

 

. . . and just about any other critter that I could stay on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I loved hearing family history from my Grandmothers. And that is how I got interested in genealogy back when my 6th grade teacher Mrs. Carlin introduced us to it. I received a special present for Christmas, a contraption called a cassette recorder and I went around interviewing relatives on their history. I still have the old tape that I did with Grammy Gregory but also digitized it to share with other relatives.

I researched in our local LDS library, going through microfilm and charting my family history. I traveled throughout the Untied States, researching in courthouses and locating where my ancestors lived, walking in their footsteps and visiting many cemeteries. The facts are wonderful but the stories are extra special.

I also started administering DNA testing for surname projects. Sometimes those paper trails end and courthouse or online research just can’t push back our lines farther but this new fangled thing called DNA testing got my interest. I started the Gregory YDNA Project in 2004 and added additional projects along the way, joining other researchers in their DNA testing. I have been known to bring DNA swab kits to family reunions to get the elders in our line tested.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ever walk down a road or trail and wonder about those that walked it before you? Well, that is how the desire came about to try and dig up something new about those people of the past along the trails that I walked. Just a lot of wondering, then putting together some of my genealogy researching skills to discover something new.

 

And I participated in several sports in school, swimming, basketball, football, track and volleyball. We had a ski team and I dressed just as fashionably for that as I do for hiking.

 

 

I did some traveling and adventuring on my own.

And I had plenty of adventures working 32 years for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF), later CAL FIRE, working my way up from a Firefighter at the end of the nozzle to Region Chief, in charge of the south half of the state.

Way back in 2012, I hadn’t been retired too long from CAL FIRE and came up with another goal for myself of having at least one adventure a week. They could be big or small or somewhere in between but I needed to get out and have that one adventure. Walt, a person whom I had worked with way back, suggested that I do something with my pictures, GPS and hikes and about that time Sierra News Online (SNO) came to being. I contacted Gina Clugston, founder/publisher/editor, with my pitch to write a blog, mostly hiking, and committed to try and complete one a week. She supported the idea and I was off to the races. Kellie Flanagan, with her amazing ability to add the spice to articles, helped guide me along the way. As server size increased, the picture quality was enhanced and then along came WordPress, writing the blog in the Cloud live. As ownership and editors changed, support for the blog continued through Lisa Clark and Wade Wheeler so I kept on writing those blogs.

A big thank you to the many hikers that accompanied on my adventures, enduring sometimes embarrassing pictures. Some of my hiking buddies are wonderful photographers and lent their pictures to help make the blog more beautiful. Thank you.

And I can’t forget our faithful canine hiking buddies over the blog’s time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might be wondering what my plans are after the blog. Well, I don’t really have any different ones. I still plan on having at least one adventure a week, just not writing the blog. I still enjoy genealogy and working on my families history. There are a bunch of projects in that area that I have on my To Do List.

I hope that my story and the pictures in this blog help show that the potential for adventure is all around us. Adventures, big or small, keep us from getting stuck in a rut. They help us to grow and learn. You just never know what your adventure will bring. Remember, every trail leads to another. Wishing you many wonderful adventures, wherever that trail takes you. And thank you so much for reading the blogs over the year.