About the New Mexico Outdoor Sports Guide Author/Publisher
The man behind the lens, the miles, and the stories
I'm Pat, and I suppose the shortest honest answer to "who are you?" is this: I'm a Kansas ranch kid who somehow ended up chasing bass through Texas bayous, flying twin-engine Beechcrafts over the American heartland, building laboratory installations for major universities, publishing fishing magazines, coding websites from scratch, and finally — finally — landing at 9,500 feet above sea level in the mountains of New Mexico with a camera in my hand and more country to explore than one lifetime can hold.
It's been quite a ride.
The Flint Hills Made Me
I grew up on three beef and dairy ranches in the Kansas Flint Hills, that vast, rolling sweep of tallgrass prairie that most people drive through without stopping. I stopped. I grew up there, learned to read weather and terrain before I could read a map, and developed the kind of bone-deep appreciation for open land and hard work that never quite leaves a man no matter how far he roams.
That upbringing — Irish on my father's side, German on my mother's — gave me a stubborn streak, a strong back, and a restlessness that kept pushing me toward the next horizon.
Earning My Wings
At eighteen I packed up and headed to Houston, Texas, enrolled at the University of Houston to study journalism, and talked my way into a job as a mechanic's helper at Hull Field Airport in Sugar Land. While I was turning wrenches, I was also earning my commercial pilot's license and CFII ratings — Certified Flight Instructor – Instrument — for both single- and multi-engine aircraft.
For two years I taught flying at Hull Field, then graduated to the right seat of a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, flying as company pilot and project manager for a construction firm, hopping job sites from one end of the country to the other. Over a decade in the air, I logged more than 2,600 hours of flight time. Every one of those hours taught me something about the land below — the way rivers carve through desert, the way mountains catch clouds, the way the country looks different and true from 8,000 feet.
Building Things — Businesses, Software, and a Magazine
After hanging up my headset, I founded Centaur Installations, a construction company specializing in laboratory equipment installation and remodeling for major universities and industrial facilities. For 17 years I owned and operated Centaur, and somewhere along the way I taught myself computer programming to build my own cost-estimating and accounting software. This was the early internet era — command-line prompts, CompuServe, the whole wild frontier of it — and I was hooked from the start.
In 1990, I sold Centaur and did what any sensible man with a lifelong passion for bass fishing would do: I bought Texas Sportsguide, a fishing magazine. I spent years fishing hundreds of bass tournaments throughout Texas and Louisiana, proudly sponsored by Skeeter Bass Boats and Boots Follmar Marine, and I also published Black Bass magazine for the Texas Black Bass Unlimited conservation organization.
When the internet started showing its real muscle in the mid-1990s, I took Texas Sportsguide online. Local business owners started knocking on my door asking me to build their websites. I taught myself HTML, CFML, and PHP, and over the next decade built and maintained more than 100 websites for small businesses across the region.
The Mountains Called
In 2000, my wife Paulette and I built our dream — Casa Oso, a log cabin perched at 9,500 feet above sea level overlooking Angel Fire, the Moreno Valley, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, with sweeping views of Eagle Nest Lake, the village of Eagle Nest, Lake Wheeler, and the Angel Fire Ski Resort. Wheeler Peak rising to the west. Bobcat Pass to the north. The valley spread out below us like a painting that changed with every season.
For 17 years, we lived that high-country life — winters of three and four feet of snow, summers of fly fishing, hiking, and exploring every trail and ridge we could find. That mountain world sharpened my eye and deepened my love for the wilderness of the American Southwest in ways I'm still discovering.
We also kept a winter home in Arizona overlooking Lake Mohave, where we spent our days fishing for smallmouth bass in crystal-clear water aboard our 20-foot Key West center console and running off-road trails through the Mojave Desert.
Santa Fe, New Mexico — Home Base
In 2017, Paulette and I sold Casa Oso — we called saying goodbye to her one of the harder things we've done — and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at Casa Santa Fe. Close to the hiking trails, close to the Sky Railway scenic railroad, close to the art and history and extraordinary landscape that makes Santa Fe one of the most compelling cities in the American West.
Now an octogenarian, I divide my time between Santa Fe's splendid summers and winters at Casa Codorniz on Lake Mohave, Arizona, where the desert light does things with color that still stop me cold with a camera in my hand.
What I Do Now — and Why
These days my work is documentation. Witness-bearing, maybe. The mountains and deserts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico are among the most extraordinary landscapes on earth, and they deserve to be seen, celebrated, and understood. Through photography and video, I try to do that — capturing the wildlife, the wilderness, the seasons, the quiet drama of the American Southwest.
My work appears in the New Mexico Outdoor Sports Guide blog, hundreds of NMOSG YouTube videos, and in the pages of Texas Sportsguide and Black Bass magazines.
A ranch kid from the Flint Hills, standing in the high desert with a camera, watching the Sangre de Cristos turn rose at dusk.
Not a bad place to end up.
