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Greg Holt
Last updated on Monday, December 23, 2002
Writing about his experiences in the places he's been clarifies and preserves them for Greg Holt, perhaps like marking signposts along a route, destination unknown.
Greg Holt (in Western Nepal) Greg was born in Texas and grew up there as well as in other places including California, New Mexico, Alaska, Germany, Venezuela, and Norway. He started college in Barcelona, Spain and later quit college in Texas to work the oilfields of Iran and Egypt. His two daughters were born in California where their mother, a fellow traveler, was also born. He left there to work a construction project in Asia for two years and returned to Korea a couple years later after a failed business attempt in the US. He brought his young family to Venezuela in the early 1990's and realized three years later that he had lived in Caracas longer than he had any other place for a continuous length of time except for when he lived in New Mexico. He was a boy then and would visit the high country with his family, fishing, camping, or climbing.
Greg has traveled for work, but that wasn't the primary motivation for going. When he had the money, he traveled just for the joy of being somewhere he had not been before: taking photographs on the savanna of Masai Maru or along a river, brown with silt, in Samburu, East Africa; hiking among Incan ruins in the mountains of Peru with his daughter and spending Christmas in the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco; scuba diving in the clear waters of Caribbean islands and teaching his girls to snorkel among the corals in Bonaire and Bequia; sitting in temple gardens in Kyoto in the spring when his oldest was a baby and she held sprigs of sakura in her tiny fingers; driving through the terraced hills of Bali to Hindu temples guarded by hordes of tourist friendly monkeys; taking time to drink sugary chai with Bakhtiari nomads in their black tents outside Shiraz; or trekking the Annapurna massif in Nepal.
He writes for personal gratification. But he has occasionally been published internationally, for instance, as a columnist in The Korea Herald.
Greg's house is in Houston but he spends at least a few days away each week on business. He works for an international engineering and construction firm as an inspector for their projects. He speak passable Spanish and, as a result, often spends time in Latin America for his work. He spent much of last year in Mexico in the colonial silver mining area of Queretaro.
Greg owns a few acres in Southern New Mexico and dreams of building a house in the temperate heights of the Sacramento Mountains there someday.
Articles by Greg Holt
The lady at the Forest Service office in Ruidoso said I could take a tree up to ten feet tall, so that's what I was determined to do. Although tempted, I wasn't going to give up on removing this tree and taking it to the land I'd bought a couple of years ago. The land where I'll live someday. Bonito Lake outside Ruidoso in the Sacramento Mountains of Southern New Mexico is a small man-made body of clear water reflecting the blue of the sky behind a dam at the end of a road that follows the Rio Bonito through forested canyons. It lies peacefully in a high country basin north of the sacred Apache peak of Sierra Blanca. It is a fine place for teaching my girls to fish.Summer: 1966. The powdery sand blew off the rock face I was clinging to and into my eyes. I blinked and squinted into the sun, craning my neck up to look up the steeply canted rock.
Through dusty glasses I looked between my outstretched arms at the stretch of the rock face above and suddenly felt utterly alone. I could not see anyone above me, only hot white rock. My fingers were jammed into a crack and my knuckles were bloodless from the grip.
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