I have been writing about Kentucky’s landscape, people, and history for more than fifty years, and now that I am retired, the process seems to be accelerating. My first publication was the book, Caves of Rockcastle County, Kentucky, privately published in 1972 when I was twenty years old. Last year, my book Bluegrass Paradise was published, and in 2025 my book Reinventing the American Thoroughbred will be released. I have four more book manuscripts in progress. In addition to these books, my published work to date amounts to fifty-seven journal articles and essays. Three more journal articles will come out next year. I guess I will quit writing when they pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands.

Most of my work concerns caves and the landscape (known as “karst”) in which they occur. I began exploring and studying caves in 1967 at the age of fourteen. In that year I joined the National Speleological Society (NSS) and the Lexington, Kentucky, chapter of that organization, the Blue Grass Grotto (BGG). Most of my early caving experience was in the Inner Bluegrass Karst Region, close to home, but beginning in 1969 my focus switched to Rockcastle County, one of the most cave-rich areas of the state. With a select group of friends from the BGG I began mapping the large and numerous caves in northeastern Rockcastle. I attended the University of Kentucky, and as I received more education became increasingly interested in the Kentucky history and the histories of caves and significant springs in our Commonwealth. From 1990 to 2001, I was employed as an environmental technician by the Groundwater Branch, Kentucky Division of Water, and in the course of my duties traveled widely across the state cataloguing hundreds of karst springs.