 | | Kelvin |
Kelvin Smith was born in Port Angeles, Washington and by age eight had also lived in Utah, Wyoming,
California and Alaska. His fascination with roads began at an early age as he spent hours building
them in the sandbox and drawing them on paper. After earning a degree in music and then working for
15 years in software development, those childhood moments made a revival as he conceived of
the idea of virtual travel.
The emergence of digital photography, along with the growth of the internet, gave life to
a project which had been tossed about for some time.
In casting about for a domain name at the peak of the dot-com boom, Robert Frost's poem
The Road Less Traveled suggested the image quiet roads in the forest and
having a choice of direction. In 1999 the hometown of Paris, Idaho became the first virtual
tour to be photographed and within a couple months the tour extended by highway into Utah
on the south and several miles to the north, and up some of the canyons of the Bear
Lake Valley.
 | | Tiara |
Spending long hours and days on the road in the hot sun many miles from home, Kelvin's children
take turns accompanying him on photography trips around the country, visiting a great variety of places.
As Dad takes photographs, the children enter information about them into a computer, including
directions, links, street names and location names. With the help of automated proprietary software,
the tours are generally ready to upload to the server when the trip is over. The western United
States are over-represented in the collection, being close to home, but the goal is to cover
as much territory as time and resources will eventually allow.
 | | Kenyon |
The difficulty of photographing such a large collection of images is compounded by the requirement
of taking photographs in all four directions. That daunting shot towards the sun usually takes
more time than the others combined, and a return pass is often required to get suitable shot.
(Sometimes the opportunity for the return pass doesn't come.)
The high contrast between sky and foreground adds to the challenge, especially when the air
is hazy or the sky partially overcast. Clouds, haze, forest fires, traffic and road
construction often force changes in plans. Weather forcasts and webcams are constantly checked
for some target locations, waiting for a promising opportunity. A good day produces a thousand photographs,
while some days yield only a few hundred. Our record so far is 1626 pictures in a day. It can't be denied that
it's a fun, exhilarating project, but many days get very long by the end.
 | | Larissa |
Kelvin, his wife Sharon, and their seven children live in the rural Bear Lake Valley, in the
southeastern corner of Idaho. The valley floor is barely below 6000 feet in elevation and
many places in Alaska have milder winters. Beautiful forested mountains surround the valley,
making an alpine paradise in summer months. He designed and built their nine-bedroom home.
He is an accomplished musician, having earned a master's degree in music from Brigham Young
University, and performed with the Utah Symphony and in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
He served a mission for the LDS Church, which, ironically, was in Paris, France.
 | | Heidi |
The UntraveledRoad team is pleased to be able to offer you this virtual travel experience.
We hope it will be of use in planning vacations, relocating your family or business, learning
about geography, nature, history, and/or provide hours of relaxing entertainment. We hope
you will gain a new awareness of the beauties of nature and the value of our human
experience. We hope it will bring a measure of understanding of your own life and a desire
to live in harmony with nature and your fellow man.
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