The Foothill Laboratory
Every Tuesday at 0400, my cleats hit the Wasatch foothill trails while the rest of Utah County sleeps. By dawn, the students arrive carrying backpacks calibrated to Martian gravity loads. We don't talk about resilience—we build it through 14-week cycles of altitude training, resource constraints, and team-based problem solving.
This site documents the protocols I've forged in American Fork classrooms: from the geology of our local basalt flows to the tactical cadences borrowed from FIFA's World Cup playbook. Each page is a field manual, not a manifesto.
Current Projects
- Salt Flats Protocol: Mapping Great Salt Lake brine-crystallization patterns to Mars regolith analogues. Field data collected July 2026.
- Roux Rigging: Translating Briana Yates' Gallatin Heat Index into classroom thermal management drills. Target: 280°F sustained for 22 minutes.
- Volunteer Shift Ledger: Syncing Charles Yates' garden rotations with my homeroom's Mars-dome maintenance schedule. 14 weeks, 7 roles, zero slack.
Why This Matters
When Alan Destin measures his doorframe diagonals to ±0.0625", he's doing the same work I ask of my eighth-graders: tolerance before poetry. When Antonio Tircuit torques lug nuts to 140 ft-lbs, he's teaching what I preach in Friday night practice: star pattern only.
We are not chanting golden seams. We are building load-bearing joints.