About

Hi, my name is Rob Bolton, and I live with my wife and son in Mason, WA along the shores of Lake Chelan. We are relatively new transplants to the Chelan Valley, having lived in Seattle for roughly twenty years prior. We purchased land in Manson with the desire to occasionally swap city life for lake life, and after building a house, decided we wanted it the other way around — we now do short-term rentals in our Seattle house and spend most of our time in Chelan.

Outside of family and work, I enjoy spending time outdoors: ski touring in the winter, family hiking in the warmer months, and trying to relearn how to mountain bike in the shoulder seasons. I like to sprinkle in car camping, occasional backpacking, city biking, and paddleboarding. My family and I enjoy traveling internationally — COVID and having a young child slowed that down for a while, but we've still managed to visit Greece, Mexico, Malta, and Italy in recent years.

I have worked in the technology industry for over 20 years, in roles ranging from web development to sales engineering to product management. I was the "webmaster" for the Summit at Snoqualmie back when that was actually a job title. I still enjoy tinkering with web technologies, hence this site.

I grew up in Vermont, with the first ten years on a sheep farm. After majoring in Economics at the University of Vermont, I spent the summer of 2001 with a paid internship in New York City at the World Trade Center. Unable to secure a full-time job, I left New York less than a month before 9/11. Realizing I wasn't cut out for finance — and grateful not to have been in the towers — I headed out West to be a ski bum for a year. A friend mentioned Alpental and Seattle, and after looking into it, I packed up my car and drove from Vermont to Snoqualmie Pass in November 2001. After a couple of years living at the pass, my now-wife and I moved down to Seattle.