About

Two words describe me:

Sylvan – inhabitant of the forest

Ashlee – old English name meaning, “in the meadow of the ash tree”

I’ve been a lover of nature since I was little. My parents would take me out for walks in the English countryside. In elementary school library class, I would look up my favorite animals, draw them and re-write the description (at that age I had no concept of plagiarizing…). I spent countless hours watching Animal Planet and spent the rest of my childhood outside. I loved to explore the creek down the street with my best friend and we were often found climbing the trees in our yards.

When I entered high school, suddenly spending outside wasn’t “cool” (it was probably never cool in middle school either, but I was blissfully unaware). It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I went on my first backpacking trip and remembered how much I loved spending time outside. Everything I loved doing as a kid I could now do as an adult – just on a bigger scale!

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I backpacked, hiked, and climbed with earnest, but began to be limited by my fragile knee joints and other repetitive use injuries. I sulked and licked my wounds on the couch for a few years. Then I joined Instagram, eager to reconnect with the natural places I loved and work on my photography skills. I started to spend a couple hours each day on my phone – obsessing about capturing and editing the “best” picture and what witty caption to post along with it. My motivation for going outside became crafting images that people would like, favorite, and follow, trying to tell the “best” stories and have the “coolest” photos.

This didn’t feel right. I used to go into nature because it was fulfilling and joyful for me, not for someone else. I quit Instagram and several months later I read an article about the bipartisan effort to permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. I always cared about the environment, but I didn’t do much about it besides picking up trash on hikes. Reading about people in our heavily divided political sphere coming together for the betterment of the earth moved me to tears. And then I realized – this is what matters to me. Nature is my home, my church, my soul, and my passion. This raw, unbridled love – not carefully crafted photos and clever hashtags – is what I want to share with the world.

I hope to inspire a deeper connection to nature within all of us. And I hope to motivate those of you who already connect with nature to cherish and work to protect it. Whether that means taking care of your local park or creating a bigger scale conservation project, I believe we have the responsibility, and the immense gift, to treasure our wild spaces and protect them for generations to come.

I hope you’ll join me.