When Rick was a young boy his father came home one day with a VW Camper Van. His family used it to go camping on the weekends and to drive half way across the country to visit his grandparents at Christmas and for summer vacation. His grandparents lived on a dirt road and the countryside was his to roam. When he graduated from high school he went on a Colorado Outward Bound Wilderness Leadership Program that lasted 50 days. He returned profoundly changed in respect to his relationship with nature and the challenges of adventure.

Rick decided it was time to move west and packed up the back of a station wagon and drove across the country to Washington. He worked at a kayak factory and planted trees for the Colville Confederate Tribes.

He lived off grid in a cabin in the Okanogan until a phone line was installed and he started making websites. He went back to school and soon found himself working in an advertising agency in Los Angeles. Life can be strange. He received a Masters degree in graphic design, and soon found himself teaching.

Rick has written two children’s books: Bear’s Tale and Bear and the Chipmunk’s Stripes. He now lives with his wife in a restored train depot along a babbling brook in the mountains of Vermont.