How I ended up in Glacier National Park
... and made a website about Glacier National Park  | Photo by the
lovely Allyson Falor | My name’s Perry. I’m a 23 year old, college-educated kid trying everything I can to avoid the 9-5, to get out of (and not get into more) debt, and live my life for my passions.Growing up in America--the land of opportunity and dreams--this can be hard. You’re brainwashed from parents, from television, from the Government’s brilliant marketers, that your life’s a list: - Go to highschool (teenager baby-sitting)
- Go to college (incur debt)
- Get an internship (corporate slavery)
- Backpack Europe (live life)
- Move to a big city, begin working & buy an apartment (incur more debt so you can never escape)
Maybe you return for grad school because you realize the debt you incurred to obtain a college degree in English is worthless (so you get into more debt). If you're lucky, you don't die before retirement and enjoy your 'golden years' on cruise ships and retirement communities. No. Not me. I refuse. I want to travel, to live my life for my passions, to avoid falling into the American trap, to travel when I’m young and open to sleeping in tents and on beaches. The biggest problem? Overcoming the obstacle of people telling you, “No, you can’t”. Well, in a year’s time I’ll be able to tell them, “Yes, I can”. And, with SiteBuiltIt, so can you! How? Read my story. My Life I grew up in suburban New York. My passion: writing. All my life my dream had been to bartend and write on a beach. Well, now I live in the Rockies and write in the mountains, but bartending’s wearing thin and making money as a writer’s damn near impossible. Yet I’m motivated, passionate, and dedicated to changing my life, to avoid more grad school debt, to live my dream. So, I made a website. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to suburban New York. I graduated high school. Went to college at the University of Michigan to study film and screenwriting. Like most college kids, I returned home for my first summer to find I could no longer live with my parents after enjoying the freedom of college. So the next summer I decided to do things differently. The Summer that Changed My Life I found a site called Coolworks. From there, I discovered a community of nomads, spending their summers in National Parks and winters chasing summer into Australia or as ski bums in Colorado or Utah. I got offered jobs in Yosemite, Alaska, Zion, and Glacier National Park, Montana. “Montana?!” I thought, “who goes to Montana?” I looked up Glacier National Park and was blown away. My application was sent in and it was set: in the summer of 2005, I would be living and working in Montana. I bought a whole load of hiking and backpacking equipment and left the flat, boring landscape of Michigan and the dirty, city-scape of New York to discover the Rocky Mountains. And fell in love: - With the big sky and snowcapped, Montana mountains...
- the turquoise, alpine lakes...
- the Rocky Mountain high...
- adventuring on Glacier National Park hiking...
- the backpacking for days on end through rugged wilderness...
- but most of all, I fell in love with discovering Glacier National Park, a world I never knew existed...
I returned to school in Michigan and yearned for the mountains so much I became an insomniac. And so I returned again the following summer. Uh-oh... Reality Sets In Graduation loomed on the horizon. My parents, having spent a fortune to help send me to the University of Michigan, insisted I get a real job. So, like a good college graduate, an all-American boy, I returned to New York City, got a ratty apartment in Brooklyn, and an 8-6 job as the personal assistant to a film producer. I hated my life. 22 years old. This is it. I’m going to be trapped. No escape. The world was awash in superficiality. My dreams of hiding in the Rocky Mountains of Montana’s Glacier National Park suffocated beneath the smog of New York City. After a few months of numbing myself with each consecutive happy hour, I finally gained the courage to quit my job, told my parents I’m moving west and pursued my dream. I wrote Portland, San Francisco and Boulder on three separate index cards, closed my eyes, exhaled a shaky breath and drew a card: Boulder. I’m moving to Colorado. A week later I was boarding a plane with a one way ticket. My plane landed. I found a job waiting tables at the Mountain Sun, Colorado’s best micro-brewery. My days were spent whittling away at film scripts, my nights bartending. But after a year, I found myself uninspired. Do you know how difficult it is to sell a script? You have a better chance of landing on the New York Times’ best seller list. And I concluded, most appropriately, that no matter how much your Mom insists you're special, perhaps I wasn’t. But, I do have a quality that I was always certain would allow me to succeed: my unwavering determination. And as I was writer-blocked, procrastinating, trying to get myself to continue writing a script on an American tank crew in Iraq that would probably never sell, I made the Glacier National Park Travel Guide to share my love of the park. I hope you enjoy your time here. Be sure to explore my personal collection of Glacier Hiking Videos. Return home from
About Me: How I Ended Up In Glacier National Park
to the Travel Guide
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