Hello and welcome to 50at60.
I’m Michael Steighner — photographer, storyteller, former lighting designer, and the person who decided that turning 60 was a good reason to visit all 50 states in a single year. Not a bucket list in the traditional sense. More like a reckoning. A way of asking myself, out loud and on camera, what the next chapter of my life was actually going to look like.
I finished. All 50 states. And I’m still processing what that means.
Where It Started
My relationship with travel started early — weekend trips to our family camp in northwestern Pennsylvania, and long summer drives along the eastern seaboard in a custom show van my family had designed, stopping at van rallies and truck shows along the way. It sounds modest, and it was. But that early sense of motion — of the world being bigger than wherever you happened to be standing — got into me young and never really left.
After school I started an event production and lighting design company. Even in those early lean years, I was intentional about carving out the summers. I backpacked through Europe every summer for what felt like a decade starting in my mid-twenties — the islands of Greece, the fjords of Norway, the Algarve in Portugal, the museums in Paris. The whole continent felt like a playground I hadn’t finished exploring. That’s where the wanderlust really took root.
As the business grew, I found myself working with clients in five-star destinations across the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and beyond. I seized every opportunity to extend those stays, to get past the lobby and into the actual place. Somewhere in there, photography became serious — not just documenting where I’d been, but learning to see the light in a place and chase it.
The 50at60 Year
The idea was simple enough: visit all 50 states in the year I turned 60. The execution was considerably more complicated.
Over the course of that year I drove more than I expected, flew when I had to, stayed in places that ranged from genuinely remarkable to aggressively mediocre, and talked to more strangers than I have in any other year of my life. I stood at Mount Rushmore the morning after an assassination attempt and watched the sun come up on those four faces. I sat in a church parking lot in Nebraska and tried to find words for what was happening in the country. I watched a thousand prairie dogs go about their business in North Dakota and lost track of time entirely. I found a Dutch town in Iowa that I could have happily lived in. I drove the Needles Highway and the Sand Hills and Spearfish Canyon and the Door County coast and the North Shore of Lake Superior, and somewhere in all of it I figured out what I was actually doing out there.
It wasn’t just about the states. It was about what comes next. What you do when the career that defined you for forty years is winding down. What you’re capable of when you strip away the familiar and put yourself somewhere new, repeatedly, for a year.
My cat Penny joined me on some of the earlier legs — she’s more of a traveler than most cats I’ve met, and I’d intended to bring her along more than I did. Going forward, she’s very much part of the plan. Chasing Light and Story isn’t a one-year project, and neither is Penny’s role in it.
What Comes Next
50at60 was the beginning of something larger. The brand it gave birth to — Chasing Light and Story — is where the journey continues. The next project is visiting all 63 National Parks, and unlike the 50 states, there’s no artificial deadline. Just me, the light, the story, and wherever the road goes.
If 50at60 was about proving something to myself, Chasing Light and Story is about what happens after you’ve proved it. The deeper work. The slower travel. The conversations I almost had and the ones I’m going to make sure I have this time.
I’m glad you’re here. This site is the archive of the year that started everything. The next chapter is already underway.
