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Mark Dornblaser grew up in Edina, Minnesota, the son of a university professor and an artist/writer. His family spent vacations backpacking, canoeing, or car camping in their station wagon, across all fifty states. These family trips instilled in him a love of nature, which led him to an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College and a Master's Degree in Oceanography from the State University of New York. Post-graduation, Mark worked as an environmental researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His job included SCUBA diving for sediment cores in the cold lakes of Nova Scotia, Ontario, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Alaska. Mark married his wife Deb in 1997 and they moved to Colorado, where he began working for the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder. While with the USGS, Mark studied greenhouse gas emissions from rivers including the Mississippi and Columbia, and boated down nearly the entire length of the Yukon River in Alaska and Canada. Always the adventurer, Mark has been to all seven continents, camera in tow. He has (briefly) flown a Cessna, a helicopter, a soar plane, and a hang glider, and has jumped out of a plane a couple times (with a parachute). He has sailed the North Atlantic in a 120' schooner, chartered sailboats with friends in the Caribbean and San Juan Islands, and even tried his hand at ice boating on a frozen lake in Colorado. Mark received his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, when he was a teen. He has been a photographer ever since, graduating to slide film and finally to digital. His photographs have appeared in Discover, Gourmet, The Boston Globe, Cape Cod Life, and Middlebury Magazine, and he has exhibited in galleries in New York, Connecticut, and Colorado. He began writing in earnest in his twenties, publishing travel articles and personal essays before turning to poetry. His poems have appeared in the Poetry Society of Colorado Annual. Mark lives with his wife Deb in Louisville, Colorado.