Hi! I'm Chuck Bonner
I'm 52 years old, and I've been exploring and observing nature part time for more than 45 years. (Just ask my mother.) I'm married and have four grown children and five grandchildren. I'm an enthusiastic member of St. Joseph the Worker Parish in Nashua, New Hampshire, and I work as a computer software engineer for a smallish company in Andover, Massachusetts.
I was in the U.S. Navy for nine years and in the Naval Reserve for 18 more years until they kicked me out for getting too old. Growing up, I was something of an Air Force brat (though we didn't move around quite as much as most Air Force families). This background has given me the opportunity to get to know many different parts of this world.
Lately, I've been fairly settled in New Hampshire, and I have gotten to know the White Mountains pretty well.
Some might say I'm too settled in my hiking habits. I go to the same few places over and over again, leaving hundreds of mountains and thousands of miles of trails unexplored. But this is my style. Not that it's boring, but that I see things which I believe others are missing. I'm not always going to the same place. Yes, it's the same longitude and latitude, but it's a different place every time I go there. It changes with the time of day, it changes with the season, and it changes with the years.
Same old Mine Falls Park? No, several years ago it was the Mine Falls Park where beavers had lived once upon a time, and a very few years ago it became the Mine Falls Park where beavers lived in the Mill Pond once again, and now it's the Mine Falls Park where beavers live in one of the distributary streams below the Mill Pond and only occasionaly visit the main pond.
Same old meadow beside the Webster-Jackson Trail? Every year for the past 25 years I've been watching it change from meadow to forest. Will this be the last year the wild roses bloom there before being crowded out by the young birches springing up all around them? One year in the not too distant future, even the birches will be overtaken by the spreading hemlocks.
I observe these things as processes, while others see them as static snapshots of nature. Far from boring, I find it fascinating and sometimes even exciting to know a wild place as thoroughly and as intimately as I know my family or my software lifecycle management.
So, if I bore you, you can leave. But if you think you'd like to take time to smell the roses, let me introduce you to some friends of mine.
And for a little "off the beaten path" stuff, stuff that has very little to do with hiking or camping, you might want to read my page of things that strike me funny, or the story of my broken thumbnail. Enjoy!
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