I was born in 1993 in Moab, Utah, to my parents, Cynamon and Shane Christensen.
My childhood started out pretty normal. We were an outdoorsy family, but not in the extreme sports sense that eventually became my life. We went camping, hiking, fishing in the mountains, and spent time outside. I played baseball and football, ran around Moab with my friends, and spent a lot of time with my dad. When I was six, my little sister Savanna was born.
I don't remember growing up thinking that my life was unusual. It was just my family and my hometown. Then things started to change.
My dad was injured at work and was prescribed OxyContin. This was during the beginning of what would eventually become recognized as the opioid epidemic, and unfortunately he became one of the people swallowed by it. The medication took over his life. The dad I knew slowly became somebody different. He became extremely addicted, stopped working, and spent more and more time bedridden. The entire dynamic of our family changed around his addiction.
In 2004, when I was eleven, our family moved from Moab to Las Vegas. Part of the hope was that getting away from Moab and getting closer to family might give my dad a chance to get away from the drugs and start over.
It didn't work.
His addiction continued taking him to a darker and darker place.
Later that year, my dad shot my mom and then took his own life.
I was eleven years old.
There really isn't a way for a kid to understand something like that. One day you have parents and a home and some version of a normal life, and suddenly everything that made up your world is gone.
Savanna and I bounced around between family members for a period of time before eventually going to live with our aunt and uncle, Michelle and Daryl.
The next seven years of my life were complicated.
I don't think anyone really knew what to do with two kids who had just experienced something that traumatic. Daryl and Michelle gave us a home and took care of us, but emotionally I was largely trying to figure things out on my own.
I spent an enormous amount of time grounded or alone in my room. I didn't have much of a social life. One of the punishments I received constantly was writing sentences by hand. I wrote pages and pages and pages of them. Over the years, it probably became thousands of pages. At the time, it felt incredibly isolating.
But looking back on it now, strangely, I also think those years gave me space to heal. I spent a huge amount of my childhood alone with my own thoughts. I had to process losing my parents before I was old enough to even fully understand what death, addiction, grief, or trauma really meant.
And it wasn't all bad. We went to movies. We traveled. We went on cruises. There were good memories mixed into those years too. That's part of what makes life complicated. Very few chapters are completely good or completely bad.
By the time I was seventeen, I was starting to think seriously about my future. I was in school and preparing for the possibility of joining the Navy and eventually becoming a naval officer. I was also working for my uncle Daryl at his carpet cleaning company.
Daryl had diabetes. One night Michelle woke me up and told me she thought my uncle was dead. I remember trying to perform CPR on him and trying to bring him back. We couldn't. He had suffered a heart attack related to his diabetes, and he died. I was seventeen.
Not long after that, my aunt kicked me out of the house and I also lost the job I had working for my uncle's company. Suddenly I was basically entering adulthood on my own. The Navy never happened. I didn't really have a plan anymore. I moved in with my girlfriend at the time and spent the next couple of years doing what a lot of young people do when they don't know where they are going. I was working, surviving, and trying to figure out who I was supposed to become.
Eventually, I discovered that she was cheating on me. The relationship ended. On its own, a breakup at nineteen isn't necessarily a defining life event. But combined with everything else I associated with Vegas, something in me was finished. I needed to leave. More than that, I needed a direction. I moved back to Moab at nineteen years old with very little figured out.
I didn't have some grand plan for becoming an adventure athlete. I was just looking for something that felt real. At first it happened slowly. I started hiking again. I reconnected with people I had known growing up. I started spending more time outside. Then I happened to move into an apartment next to Andy Lewis.
That completely changed the direction of my life.
Andy introduced me to slacklining. He introduced me to BASE jumping. He introduced me to a community of people who were living in a way that I didn't even know was possible. They weren't just going outside on the weekends. Adventure was their life.
Andy was doing things that, to me, seemed almost impossible. I looked up to him tremendously. I wanted to understand that world and eventually be capable enough to exist in it alongside him. So I threw myself into it. Completely.
I learned to slackline. Then highline. I learned rock climbing. Rope systems. Rigging. BASE jumping. Canyoneering. River sports. I started establishing highlines across the desert and eventually around the world. I didn't learn these things because I had some career plan. I learned them because I wanted to become the person capable of doing them.
Adventure became my education. The desert became my classroom. For years, nearly every decision I made revolved around getting better, going farther, learning another skill, traveling somewhere new, or finding another place where we could build something that had never existed before.
I spent significant time traveling, including long stretches in Thailand in 2016 and 2017, and again in 2019. I traveled with partners and friends. We climbed, jumped, explored, and lived incredibly simply at times.
In 2018, I moved in with Andy. Over the years, our friendship became much more than friendship. He became my brother. We traveled together, worked together, jumped together, rigged together, built projects together, got ourselves into ridiculous situations together, and shared an enormous portion of our adult lives.
Then another important person came into my life.
Around 2020, I became close with my friend Rusty. Rusty had the same appetite for adventure, but access to a completely different world. He owned aircraft, including a helicopter, and suddenly the boundaries of what an adventure could look like expanded dramatically. We would load mountain bikes, packrafts, BASE rigs, or whatever else we needed into a helicopter and fly into places that would otherwise take enormous effort to reach. Sometimes we would get dropped at the top of BASE jumps. Sometimes we would fly into remote rivers. We traveled to Alaska, Central America, the Caribbean, and all over the United States. Andy, Rusty, and I shared some experiences that honestly still don't feel completely real when I think back on them.
From roughly 2020 through 2025, life felt enormous. Those years contained some of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had. I had built a life around adventure. I was traveling the world. I was surrounded by people I loved. I was developing real expertise as an athlete and rigger. Projects were getting bigger. Opportunities were opening up. And somewhere along the way, what had started as a kid looking for a direction had turned into a career and an identity.
In 2025, another chapter began when I met Allie. For a long time, most of my life had been focused on the next adventure. With Allie, I started thinking much more seriously about the future. Not just where we were going next week, but what we could build over the next ten or twenty years. A life. Businesses. Projects. Travel. A future together.
Then, in June of 2026, everything changed again.
I lost Andy.
My best friend. My brother. The person who had played one of the biggest roles in turning me into the person I am today.
It is difficult to describe losing somebody who is woven into almost every part of your adult identity. So much of what I know how to do, where I've traveled, the people I know, the stories I tell, and the person I've become is connected to him in some way. And now I'm learning how to carry all of that forward without him.
Looking back at my life, there is a strange pattern to it. About every decade, something has happened that completely destroyed the version of life I thought I understood. At eleven, I lost my parents. At seventeen, I lost my uncle and the home I had grown up in after their deaths. And now, in my thirties, I have lost Andy.
Each time, there has been a period afterward where I have had to figure out who I am again. I don't pretend to understand why those things happened, and I wouldn't choose any of them. But I do know what happened afterward.
When I came back to Moab at nineteen, loss eventually pushed me toward the outdoors and toward a life that I never could have imagined as a kid.
And right now, I feel another transformation happening.
I'm grieving. I'm figuring out how to live in a world where one of the most important people in my life isn't here anymore. But I'm also incredibly excited about what comes next.
Allie and I are building toward a future together. I'm developing projects bigger than anything I've attempted before. I'm looking at everything I've learned through BASE jumping, highlining, rigging, travel, business, and a lifetime spent outside and asking what I can create with it.
I don't want the story of my life to be about the things I've lost. Those things are part of me, and they always will be. But the more important part of my story has always been what I built afterward.
I think I'm at the beginning of that process again.
And I'm excited to find out what comes next.