Hello! My name is Russell Vance. I’m a retired psychotherapist turned environmentalist, philosopher and essayist. I want to introduce you to my new blog page and tell you about myself.
This isn’t my first web page but I am excited about it and anxious to find people who will enjoy it and follow it. My beautiful soul-mate, Pamela, and I headed west in 2014 to work as volunteers for the National Park Service. We soon fell in love with our new home and became Montana residents. We love the west, especially the Rocky Mountains and desert! We served as campground hosts sixteen miles into the wilderness and I started my avocation in wildlife management. We became nomads, spending the first of May thru September in Glacier National Park (northwest Montana), November to March in the deserts of the southwest, and the rest of our time visiting family in the Midwest. Our current home is a twenty-one foot 1996 Roadtrek Class-B RV. That’s a 96C210P for Roadtrek fans. With sufficient solar power, we live most of the time off-the-grid. People call it boondocking. We can go two weeks in the wilderness before being forced to go into town to dump our tanks and get more water. Oh, I can’t forget food and laundry.
When we’re not working for the Nat’l Park Service or visiting family, I spend my time roaming through the wilderness, taking pictures, studying the marvels around me and thinking about my next essay. In 2019 we made a 15,000 mile journey around Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, making it all the way to the Arctic Ocean in Canada.
My essays and blogs will almost always be about four subjects: the environment, our adventures as nomads living off-the-grid, social issues, and philosophy. Since I am an unabashed tree-huger, you won’t be surprised to know that I am philosophically an ontological naturalist and existentialist. Over the years I have written extensively on all four topics. I’m also the author of two novels, four novella and a handful of other fictional works that almost always address one of my subjects. I started out having them published and sold on Kindle or Amazon, but that seemed to actually limit my readership because I got lost in the plethora of good writers. Since I’m not trying to make money from any of this, I’m allowing people to have the books for free. Having to switch my web-site hosts, I’m going to have to find a new way to offer my books. If you’re interested, keep watch and I’ll announce how I’m going to share them. You can follow me on Facebook – www.facebook.com/old.conservationist – and on Twitter at @re_vance.
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