You may wonder why my web site has its odd name, well there are a couple of reasons. Foremost, I used to travel to and from work on my Marin bike when time allowed which would be two to four times each week. Most days my route took me past a dead tree in my home town of Warrington, United Kingdom that some local people had started attaching old shoes and boots to. As time past the tree became known as the Tree of Lost Soles. This always made me smile each time I’d cycle past and would initiate a different thought based on the footwear I saw on passing. “What was it’s past history, were had it been, what had its wearer seen on their travels”. In 2014/ 15 my wife and I had taken a year out to go travelling around various places in the world, hiking and backpacking mainly, and while in the South Island, New Zealand I picked up a news article that the tree had been cut down by the council. Local outrage followed of course! BBC News Article; - Tree Of Lost Soles: Council sorry for chopping artwork

Within a few days of me reading about this we passed through a small village where random travellers and passers-by had attached personal items to a wire fence and this struck a cord with me. So, I suppose I initially thought to get the domain name to say something about the lost tree stump and the human appetite to leave a reminder of the journey taken, however, as I was still travelling, I had no way to make that happen at that time so it just sat on the internet with a landing page for many months.

In 2014 prior to setting out on our world trip I had bought a Nikon camera and a 50mm lens to take with me. As we travelled, I took many photographs and wanted to be able to have the opportunity to share those with anyone that had a mind to be interested. We had been posting on our blog to keep family and friends up to date with our progress and some of the photographs I had taken with phone and camera had been uploaded to the blog. On my return home I decided to create something positive with the photographs I had taken and the domain name TreeOfLostSoles.com provided me with an opportunity to do this and so I decided to code my own website.

The second reason for the web site name is a simple one and follows an incident that happened on a 24-hour Three Peak Challenge I was leading years earlier. One of the participants had assured me he was fully prepared prior to our departure with all the kit. All seemed well until we were descending our first peak of the challenge, Ben Nevis, Scotland’s and the UK’s highest peak. I could see he was starting to lag behind the rest of the group so I held back to see what was wrong. As I approached, he started waving his foot in the air with the sole of his boot flapping up and down like a thirsty dog’s tongue. Within a few paces more the sole was off and sailing down the mountain side never to be seen again. He hobbled down the rest of the way in some degree of pain due to the rough terrain. All the while the rest of us had an amazing amount of fun at his expense I'm afraid. Anyway, these little things sometimes sit in the back of your mind and resurface when they get a little poke from outside, in this case the Tree of Lost Soles.

So my adventure with photography began back in 2014 and my desire to remember and recorded what at the time I thought would be a once in a lifetime experience. Earlier in my life I had hiked around the UK from a very early age having been given the freedom and trust to do so responsibly by my parents. This love of mountains and the outdoors has stayed with me throughout my life. A lot of this time I had the desire to go and climb high and move fast. It’s only as I’ve grown older and realised that the reason I visit the mountains and the beautiful empty places of our world is that I am far more interested in the journey taken, than reaching the destination. Photography has been the tool I’ve used to slow me down and elongate the journey, sometimes to the chagrin of my wife, as many a photographers long suffering partner will already know.

Keep well

Dave