---
title: Choosing Arizona
date: 2026-04-22T08:15:00-07:00
author: Matt Bloomfield
canonical_url: "https://www.mlj.one/life/choosing-arizona"
section: Blog
---
[ ← Blog ](https://www.mlj.one/life) Post April 22, 2026 

# Choosing Arizona

Moving to Arizona was as big a surprise to us as it was to anyone else. But it's been a great decision for us and our kids.

 

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 Moving to Snowflake, Arizona, was not something I had in the cards for my adult life.

The first time I brought my wife to Snowflake was when we were engaged. Excitedly, I showed her around town - the school, the gas station, the few restaurants - I thought I'd finish off by topping the hill on 7th South so we could see the temple in the distance and then slowly make our way there. At that point, she leaned over to me, tears in her eyes, and said, "Please don't ever make me live here."

To her credit, she was from Virginia. Green, moist, beautiful Virginia. And this was November in Northern Arizona, where there hasn't been rainfall since July.

But that's not why I never thought we'd live in Snowflake. It's because any job I could conceive myself doing didn't exist here. I was at BYU studying Mechanical Engineering. Those jobs are in city centers. 2008 had decimated Snowflake economically, and it took at least a decade to recover.

Fast forward 8 years to 2021: COVID has happened. Our lives have been turned upside down. Virginia, where we lived at the time, is a police state where you can't even go to a park without getting a citation. My job at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent out an email telling us we could choose to a) come back to the office, b) go hybrid (3 days in the office), or c) go remote. The catch? If you chose option C, you had to move outside of the D.C. Metro area.

Easy come. Easy go.

So, we moved! We sold our house, packed our things, and moved in with my in-laws in Layton, Utah. Is that what we wanted? Not really, but it was too hard to buy a house remotely and we weren't sure where to live... after all, there was no commute to consider. That actually turned out to be a pretty difficult decision to make, given there were no constraints forced upon us beyond living within the United States.

We knew we wanted to move to the West because the way it handled COVID. We looked at places all the way from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to Prescott, Arizona. At one point we talked about Nebraska. There were really no options off the table completely.

Slowly, we whittled it down to a few "musts":

- It had to be rural enough that we could buy a few acres
- It had to be covenant-free or close to it
- It had to have good weather
- It had to be within a few hours of family

We looked heavily in Montana and Southern Utah, but never found a place that made sense. We put offers in and spent every weekend with realtors. By the end of the year, we were exhausted.

We went to Snowflake for Christmas that year to be with my family. While there, my dad brought up the land across the street from his house; it was 7.5 acres, and he knew the owner.

"No way Jenni will live here", I said.

A few weeks later, Jenni called me at work (I worked at a co-working space in Ogden at the time). She wanted to meet up for lunch. As we sat and ate, she was pushing her food around on the plate, her eyes avoiding mine. Finally, she looked up at me. "Matt, I know where we are supposed to live. Snowflake."

I was floored. I was opposed. I'd left that behind, we had our own life now and I didn't want to do something that felt like a step backward. Besides, I went to high school there. I was nervous about how I'd be remembered. But it didn't matter. We both felt a confirmation. Within a few weeks we'd bought the land, secured a rental home, bought a truck, and moved to Arizona.