The Valley of the Gods

doorI moved 5 hours from the nearest city, 11 miles from the nearest town (Dolores, pop. 1,500), and one mile from the nearest paved road. Until recently, my nearest neighbor was a ¼ mile away. But nooo, that ain’t far enough.

In order to meditate properly, I have to go out and get CD’s of Eckhart Tolle […]

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North Kaibab Plateau, East Rise, Morning

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, […]

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Rainbow Rim Trail at Sunset

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 […]

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The Snake Range

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 […]

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Ruby Mountains

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 […]

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Pit Hell State Park

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. […]

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Abert

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 […]

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Steens Mountain

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 […]

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Alvord Desert

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, […]

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Overlook

 

The day before Halloween.  It seems too strange to call it All Hallows Eve Eve.  The road to the Colorado Overlook in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, is paved with hazardous jutting claws of rock snarling from lips of stair-step drops “which visitors may avoid by parking on the road and walking to the overlook.”  And […]

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