Standing in a forest of snags, a dead woodland. Ponderosa burned by fire. No less in beauty than a living thing. Aspen coppering in autumn. Sun rises. Navajo Mountain, a bluing turtle’s back, looming above the Paria Plateau, edged by the sharp burgundy of the Vermillion Cliffs.
A bevy of does just before the rut, snorting, […]
The canyon losing definition as the sun breaks toward the Uinkarets. Declivities dissolve into dusky and soft shapes. Cavities fill, first with light, and then swell with darkness. Bereft of the contours chiseled in youth, flies buzz on the carcasses of stone, backlit by flakes of ash from the long dead volcanoes spread in chains […]
Highway 50, wandering east-west through Nevada, is billed as America’s Loneliest Highway. I can’t believe it’s any lonelier than some of the other highways I’ve travelled (95 in Oregon, 278 or 225 in Nevada, 51 in Idaho). Still, it’s pretty damned desolate.
A vast, wandering playa stretches south, some of it mirrored with a recent, rare […]
The Ruby Mountains may be the most picturesque range in all of Nevada’s 110,000 square miles. I watched the sun set behind the Sulphur Spring Mountains from a notch in the snow-covered Rubies in late May. From the mountaintop, I peered into the wide, flat valley to the east, Ruby Valley, where more north-south trending […]
State parks tend toward the rowdy set, though I like to think I’ve progressed in my tolerance of my fellow asshole. The State park caters to families in what the young man in the gatehouse referred to as “the resort experience.” I was in the agricultural region of central Washington, and we’re not talking D.C. […]
I dropped down a gravel road from the western scarp wall of Hart Mountain, a gigantic fault block mountain that, like a keep with retaining walls 3,600 feet in height, dominates the surrounding terrain of Warner Valley. The road almost in freefall.. These cliffs impose heavy shadows upon the floor of Warner Valley near the […]
I’d once read that Steens Mountain might be the most beautiful region in all of Oregon. That’s much said. I’d been to Oregon’s beaches, up and down its coast, licked the icing from its Cascades, swatted mosquitoes in the heavy June snows at Crater Lake. So Steens had a lot to live up to. As […]
Three day gettin’ here, the long way from Mancos, Colorado, my home town. I had a wedding to not stand up in along the way in Colorado Springs. From there, I meandered up and down the Tetons. The Tetons, one of the only ranges within the Cordillera of the American Rockies to continue their uplift, […]
Mounting a coastal mountain on the central Oregon coast, through clouds that wrap everything in humid scents. A huge bigleaf maple stands on its hind legs, gaping roots forming a tunnel. I pass under the roots, past giant lady ferns and flowering dogwoods, spilling out onto a magnificent headland.
The cliffside cloaked in flowers, ringed by […]
Zion. I step out of my cabin after a late dinner. A new moon burnishes the canyon floor. One cliff shadow falls against the next. The bright moon, rising over the peaks to my back. A loan tree atop the canyon wall occults the moon, like a spider in the light. The white teases out […]
