Desert Scars

With eight inches of average annual rainfall, the wind wrought canyons of the Southwest are a bleak, craggy, vista. The elements have given way to an otherworldly ecology, haunting and foreign. 

Here, the distinctions between life and death are made thin and mortality is remembered as an immediate reality. Amidst some sort of stoic struggle, the petty doldrums of modern existence are muted, eclipsed by a greater perspective.

The weary parts of my soul are quieted. It is a welcome peace.

UT Route 50 at Sunset

Moving Mountains

There are only a few routes built through the rugged Northwest landscape of volcanoes that 2 million years of tectonic subduction has thrust skyward. What roads exist, tenuously do so, as snow, timber, and rock routinely render them impassible, as if the land itself felt affronted in some way and saw fit to retaliate.

And we fight back. Undeterred from our ambitions, we send resources, time, and materials into these places to push back against wildness; not to tame or destroy, but to assert some right of existence, that we might know the edge of the world and the edge of ourselves.

It is some sort of pilgrimage, perilous and sacred. Let's hope we all find our way.

WA Route 2 at Sunrise