Tag Archives: photos

DanaMite

DanaMite founder of Total Escape

Internet Pioneer

totalescape.com  – online since 1996

(before the dot com crash, before digital cameras, before GPS, before social media & way ahead of smartphones)

Sole creative force of Total Escape, Dana Williams left her 3D animation career to start living and working her dream job, online and off. Utilizing artistic talents, computer skills, a vast knowledge of the California landscape and a simple love of nature, to make it all come together for a killer web site called Total Escape.

27 years online means fresh content & updates every month; reworking web code every few years to keep up with various browsers, apps, maps, and wildfires.

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“travel agent to the back woods”

greenhouseLiving close to the earth with organic gardening and rural living, DanaMite strives to offer California residents, new-comers and visitors unique, local destinations, concentrating on the outdoors – well away from overcrowded, busy, urban cities and tourist traps. Total Escape can show you how to discover the secret, hidden spots on your public lands that the gov web sites will not even dare to mention.

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the independent source for California travel

NO CORPORATE sponsorshipCalifornia Camping Photos
No venture capital
No government subsidies
No annoying pop-up ads
No scripts chugging bandwidth

No membership needed

 

Decades without a television set lends plenty of time for studying terrain, topographic maps, GPS coordinates and thousands of photographs to compile more than 8000 pages on just California travel. Far from the daily grind of everyday life, DanaMite continues in educating the public about local travel, camping, family farms, organic cafes, outdoor recreation, respecting the land, responsible use of our resources & how to get more enjoyment out of weekend travels.

outdoor girls

Things that started Total Escape:

 

entrepreneur

YOUR SUPPORT keeps Total Escape going:

youtube100

Expert Camping Pro California
40+ years of documenting back roads of California, plus some Baja & Utah too!
utahlover
DanaMite loves Utah, almost as much as she loves California.
tejonpass
Tejon Pass “Cristo’s Umbrellas” art installation 1991. Photo copyright – Kevin Robinson

condor costume

Parks and Recreation Magazine

California Parks and Wreck

tv the big distraction

step 1. kill your television
step 2. get outside, everyday
step 3. sleep overnight, under the stars

For those who may be still trapped in TV-Land, welcome to Total Escape, a dedicated web site all about the “real world” of wilderness and non-fiction, California style.

parksrectv

Before I started my web business people would suggest to me that I need to write a book. So I naturally chose the world wide web. Now decades later, they are still asking the same question. “Why don’t you write a book on this stuff?”

I say “I did, it’s online. On the internet already. Go look.”
Puzzled, they would turn away to gaze at their device.

Total Escape was created in the web 1.0 days (1996), so I could easily keep track of my many travels, the awesome destinations, my recommendations, my travel logs, zillons of photographs, camping trips, the back roads, signs, maps, GPS, all of it. I worked my day job doing 3D & then moonlighted starting this small web biz. My biggest draw to the internet format at first was being able to update outdoor info instantly. Secondly, it was the ability to work from anywhere with a phone line. (56k anyone?)

No toxic inks, no newspaper. No glossy mag. No waste. Just free digital energy about outdoor destinations, transferred across the cyber waves, just for you the avid Escaper.

park magazine

Then came the buy-out offers and seasonal magazine ideas from sources in San Diego. By late 2003, none had solidified. Several print magazines did however mention totalescape.com in a few articles, which resulted in some nice traffic spikes. Eternally grateful for the early on-lookers and participants!

Quite personally, I had already had my share of smelly inks, papers & paints in art college. Working in a computer career field, I was fully aware of the web in the early 1990’s. I was ready for the computer age & the internet. Eager in fact! Ready to make that leap from graphics & print concepts over to web windows was all I thought about for years.

I did not want to print anything; waste anything. I wanted my biz to be state of the art, futuristic – so here I am, 26 years later. WOW!

Thousands of photos, hundreds of destinations, all local to California. All by itself, Total Escape is a Parks and Recreation Magazine online – and always updating.

DanaMite
Total Escape – California, Off the Beaten Path
totalescape.com

California Outside Blog

California A to Z

AtoZsmalltowns

California Photos
flickr.com/photos/danamite/sets/

propanecampfire
Stupid idea #544967 – the propane campfire
Shouldn’t we be looking up at the stars?

secluded camps

ranger

Parks & Forests

Wilderness List

califrepublic

California Google Maps

Southern California Photos

Thousands of places – all local, in California; Millions of possibilities for your road trips.

25 years worth of photographs:
the ever-growing Total Escape image bank is on
flickr

Recent feeble attempts at trying to manage over 50,000 photos from 2+ decades worth of California travels has lead me to flickr.com.

Residing in several locations – first, Southern California, then the Kern County mountains, then over to the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo county and now living in Northern California – traveling all over California to explore. Utah, Baja, Sierra Nevada, Shasta, the Lost Coast, Lakes, Deserts, mountains – all of it. All California back roads & small towns.

Why should a small biz like me need to pay for monthly bandwidth hosting photos, when most of you just wanna look at beautiful vacation photos? (bored at work presumably).

Way back sometime, I decided flickr was an easy enough venue for me to host my best work for you to see, plus tell stories, rave reviews, add recommendations. From mud-whomping to hot springing, petroglyphs, fishing creeks, hiking, camping – DanaMite has a lot of adventures, ready to share & inspire you to get outside this weekend.

While the majority of this image library is not focused on Southern California, it can lead SoCal residents to where they really wanna go – REAL WILDERNESS. California is a big, tall state with forests, mountains and lakes.

CALIF OUTDOOR PHOTOS

califrepublic

#1 Top Viewed Image

Lake Genevieve

California Wildflowers

CA Wildflowers 2010

Figueroa Mountain

Figueroa Mtn