About Us

Welcome to our website, Amazing Outdoor Adventures! We hope you enjoy our website and find plenty of amazing and useful information. We love everything about the outdoors and this website is a labor of love for the both of us. Look around, see all the interesting things you can find, and then get out there and enjoy everything this wonderful world has to offer!

From high adventure camping, to family outdoor activities, to grilling (hey it’s outside, it’s meat, it’s family – and if you’ve seen our Dad’s reckless disregard for lighter fluid it counts as an adventure!), if it involves being outside of the house we are eventually going to write about it.

Thanks for stopping by. If you love what you read, please consider making any purchases through one of the Amazon links you will find throughout the site. It helps us pay for costs and spend more time making this site even better for you and others. So now about us:

smiling alaska mountain man
This was actually extremely clean shaven.

Shane Dayton, aka “Big Alaska”

Back in Iowa I had the giant beard and long hair and was rocking a Jerry Garcia mountain man look, so “Big Alaska” made sense when I first came back from the Last Frontier…and since I played poker it sounded like a really great poker playing name, as well.

Funny enough once back in Alaska I told this story to the weekly poker game we ran out of some University apartments, they decided to call me “Big Iowa” instead.

Aside from having a traveling addiction I will never ever try to get a cure for, you may have guessed I’m not what you would call a svelte figure.

I love cooking, hiking, spontaneous adventures, and am a complete travel junkie. If I’m not taking 5-6 adventurous trips a year, I’m not happy. I apartment hunt based on distance to nearby hiking trails and refuse to apologize for it, as well.

A proud Eagle Scout, there’s not much about the outdoors I don’t like, though I really wish I could swim so I could enjoy the water a lot more.

A short list of my outdoor experiences include Eagle Scout, camping across the country, getting dropped off at a random isolated lake island in Alaska, as well as plenty of hiking, traveling, fishing, shooting, honing my survival skills and more!

I’m proud to appear as an outdoor expert on many other major outdoor related sites and shows while Amazing Outdoor Adventures has been featured on shows or outdoor blogs including the nationally syndicated RM World Travel radio show, Know Prepare Survive, Survival Life, Embora Pets, and more!

You can also read about my current dream bucket list event involving nature in my personal post where I discuss preparing to become a PCT thru hiker.

Lake Erie Walleye
I Actually Caught This Fish.

Jon Dayton, aka “The Average Athlete”

I was your typical Midwest Kid, growing up outdoors and playing a number of different sports.  I was so good, I actually got to play 4 Years of Division III Football, which is why my friends jokingly refer to me as an Average Athlete.  Besides football, I spent my college years studying history, drinking, playing cards, and playing NCAA Football on the PlayStation.

Since I was a kid, I spent the majority of my time outdoors exploring, fishing, camping, hiking, hunting, and doing anything I could think of outside.

Today, I make sure to take at least a few fun fishing trips every year to places like Lake Erie or Canada, and I also like to do a little pheasant and deer hunting.

With two young kids, I’m really excited to take them on Camping trips, and to start teaching them about the Great Outdoors!

Hope you enjoy our website and thanks for stopping by!

Update: We’ve come a long way in even just a year! Check out our 101 outdoor blog post celebration blog post reflecting on how far we’ve come over our first 100 posts and where we plan on taking the blog from here!

2019 Update: Several hundred posts later and we’re still going strong! Thanks to everyone for the amazing support, for helping us create high quality content, and a big special thanks to Midwest Websites for the awesome re-design job on the website. Now it’s easier than ever to find our great content, move around the website, and it even looks professional – almost like we know what we’re doing. We can’t thank them enough for the awesome job on the website redesign! Thanks guys!