A Family Adventure


Tyson, Emilie & Isaac

This website contains trip reports from our outdoor adventures. Our most common pursuits are hiking, back country skiing, bicycling, and sea kayaking. We live on a small airport and enjoy flying all over southern New England. Most of the posts are reports from our recent trips. Occasionally we will share tidbits about how we planned a trip.

For a great introduction to us, read our Major past trips.

Being outdoorsy folks, we try to do well by the environment and so we built an energy efficient house in 2010 and have been living there since.

Send us your questions at contact@j3.org.

How can I do what you do?

If you want to know how to get your kids outside, I would say just try it. As every parent knows, each kid is unique and what works for one kid or one family may not work for another. The only “must” is safety. The same hazards apply to kids as to adults. Start with something small and build from there.

How did you get so good at X?

  • we buy and read a lot of instruction books.
  • we take a lot of classes. Check out this page with links to classes we have taken.
  • we join local clubs and learn from the best people there. Here are the organizations we are or have been part of.
  • we continually practice and strive to improve our skills

How do you pick out a place to go and learn about that place?

  • maps and charts: club maps, open street maps, historic topo maps, conservation group maps, tax maps, nautical charts, etc.
  • guide books: big guide books available on Amazon to small self published guidebooks found in obscure nooks of the internet, or checkout counters of local stores. Often the guidebook hints at a larger area to be explored and then we go back to maps or the internet for more information.
  • word of mouth: from friends, club led trips, or group discussion boards.
  • satellite view on maps: hey that looks interesting, let’s see if we can figure it out more.
  • searching the internet: after one of the above provides a nugget and we need more information.
  • You can see some of our favorite places on the destinations page.

And, if you just want occasional suggestions, check out our advice page.

What equipment do you use?

This blog focuses on the stories of our trips, but occasionally I post commentaries about the gear we use.

  • Airplanes – some information on our planes and upgrades we have done
  • Kayaks – TBD
  • Cameras – TBD

Authors

Emilie Phillips

Emilie Phillips
Emilie

Emilie is the primary author on this blog. Emilie is a big fan of anything far from civilization. She’s usually the instigator for biting off an adventure that is a little too big. Emilie grew up hiking in Virginia and back country skiing in West Virginia. She picked up sea kayaking in New England after several unsuccessful years of white water kayaking in college. Emilie learned to fly after she and Tyson built a house on a planned airport community in New Hampshire.

Professionally, Emilie works as a machine learning engineer. For full details, see her resume.

Tyson Sawyer

Tyson Sawyer
Tyson

Tyson grew up on the Jaffrey airport pushing planes around and flying a J3 Cub. After school he would hike up Mount Monadnock to fly hand built remote control gliders. He gave up outdoor pursuits for several years to race cars competitively in autocross. After meeting Emilie, he got back into hiking, and discovered backcountry skiing, rock climbing, and sea kayaking.

Tyson is an embedded software engineer during the week.

Isaac Sawyer

Isaac

Isaac isn’t contributing to our posts yet, but he’s an integral part of our family and our trips.

John & Trudy Phillips

John and Trudy hiking down Mount Pickering

We have occasional contributions from John & Trudy, Emilie’s parents. Both have been active in their local Natural Bridge chapter of the Appalachian Trail Club (NBATC) and in the national Appalachian Trail Conservancy. They through hiked the AT in 2009. Both John and Trudy have been recognized for their service to the ATC. They run their own website with maps of Dolly Sods in West Virginia.

Credits

Credits for the design of this website.

The name of this website is based on Tyson’s favorite airplane, the J3 Cub.

Privacy Policy and Cookies Notice.

Miscellaneous Links

A random post from the past.