Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park didn’t exist when Carleton Watkins visited in 1861. It took another 29 years for the creation of the park. The birth of an idea that came to help define the west advanced by two friends who came out to California together from back east. A...
Mountain Springs, Nevada
Mountain Springs, Nevada could have been on the way to nowhere as far as he was concerned. That’s where he worked as a finish blade operator when they widened Nevada State Route 160. Not a bad job. He took it to be left alone. Right away the other guys caught on,...
Durango, Colorado
Durango, Colorado hosted a colony of social climbers who had hit the skids. Once their ambitions withered, this is where a handful of them landed. An exclusive retreat awaited them on the outskirts of town off Sawmill Road. The retreat was the brainchild of a cagey...
Kennewick, Washington
Kennewick, Washington turned sour so fast she hardly noticed. His lies exploded like dry kindling on hot campfire coals. They were brittle and thin. At first she could ignore them, just as she could ignore political ads on the TV news. His truths didn’t turn out to...
Socorro, New Mexico
Socorro, New Mexico lapsed into familiar early morning languor. Dreaminess floated down from the lemon sky into her back garden. She sat with a mug of coffee in cool sunrise shadows. The barking of a nearby dog was accompanied by a sudden jolt of discomfort. It was...
Glacier National Park Celebrates A Birthday
Glacier National Park celebrates a birthday today. On May 11, 1910, President Taft signed the bill that established Glacier as America’s tenth national park. Chances are, President Taft wouldn’t have required Secret Service protection for a hike on the Highline Trail...
Great Basin National Park
Great Basin National Park in Nevada is home to something so old, and yet so alive, we can’t help but feel awestruck. The bristlecone pine we can see in the park run from 4,700 and 5,000 years old. Trees alive at the birth of Minoan Civilization on Crete and the dawn...
Medimont, Idaho
Medimont, Idaho just might be the town that turned things around for him. But right now the middle of his back was ablaze. The doc spun out some thoracic mumbo jumbo. Clearly not a doc who graduated in the top half of his class. It was his own damned fault. If he...
Laguna Beach, California
Laguna Beach, California dozed under the late spring marine layer. Steep steps of peeling white brick lead down the bluff from the motel to the beach. Salt air assaulted the iron railings. They gave him a job painting, everything white. A stiff bristle wire brush...
Limon, Colorado
Limon, Colorado rattled in the savage wind for the seventh straight night. It was a cruel wind that sliced open the sky. Black gusts ripped apart rose bushes and ripped heirloom tomatoes off the vine. Then the wind was gone. But the soul had been torn out of the town...
Buffalo, Wyoming
Buffalo, Wyoming could have been a fine spot for Leon Trotsky. If Leon had wound up exiled in Wyoming rather than Mexico City, the man who more or less engineered the 1917 Russian Revolution may have tacked a few more years on to his convoluted life. Trotsky was...
Lone Pine, California
Lone Pine, California wound up being where he buried the metal ammo case lifted out of his stepfather’s garage. For the first time in ages, he no longer had anything to complain about. No worries at all. Stuffed inside that ammo case was his mom’s jewelry. She’d...
Reserve, New Mexico
Reserve, New Mexico is where the volcanoes are so well-mannered they erupt only once. She was an out of work geologist. She grasped both the science and the mystery of those volcanoes. She appreciated the formations, what the textbooks referred to as monogenetic...
Sidney, Montana
Sidney, Montana had the closest garage. The tow truck driver told him its proprietor was a former Egyptian Air Force mechanic who cut his chops working on F16s. It was a long drive back to town and the tow truck driver didn’t have much else to say except he no longer...
Felton, California
Felton, California was where she went to check out the redwoods. She sailed into town in a 1954 MG TF 1250, hastily borrowed from a neighbor after admiring it for months. The keys were in the ignition. She figured her neighbor wouldn’t mind being without his car for...
Glendive, Montana
Glendive, Montana was, without a doubt, her kind of town. She was the noisome mother of a pregnant teenage bride. Shortly after nine, she showed up at the poolhall. She had on a yellow sweatshirt from one of the casinos in West Wendover, Nevada. Her pool cue case...
Griffith Park
Griffith Park turned out to be so gorgeous, so improbable, that it bandaged the city’s wounds and fixed its faults. No matter how astonishing the extravagances, how grievous the troubles, how remarkable the achievements of the city surrounding it, nothing could ever...
National City, California
National City, California was lost in fog so thick front doors could not be opened and cars could not be driven. Seagulls took shelter under damp tarpaulins stretched across the invisible shipyard. She was stuck at the Starbucks on Highland Avenue. A few days before...
