A field journal of desert roads, ranch towns and the plants that outlast them.
Plate I — Rider, high desert
The lead story
Plate II · Roads
Monument Valley, UT
The road to the buttes
Sixty miles of two-lane blacktop, and then the horizon stands up.
9 min
read
Towns
Mile
0
·
6 min
Adobe at first light
Mud walls, blue doors and the slow start of a long drive west.
Ranches
Mile
352
·
7 min
A rider on the rim
A butte, a long drop and one horse that knew the trail better than we did.
Water
Mile
561
·
5 min
Where the Colorado turns
Above a river that took six million years to cut its way here.
Ranches
Mile
842
·
11 min
The last windmill on the ranch road
A fourth-generation rancher, a pump that still turns, and very little rain.
Skies
Mile
1,120
·
4 min
A sky with nothing in the way
No towns, no moon, and the Milky Way all the way down to the creosote.
Plants
Mile
1,214
·
8 min
The trees that keep time
Joshua trees grow about an inch a year. We sat with them until dark.
The plates · six ways in
Pick a plate, find a road
The almanac · Issue 41
Waxing moon over the Mojave
6:52
Sunrise
18:31
Sunset
1,214
Miles
Field notes · short ones
Small things seen from the road
Kingman, AZ
Boots on the porch
Left to dry on a ranch porch outside Kingman. Nobody asked whose they were.
Amboy, CA
Tracks before sunrise
A lizard crossed the dune at first light. By nine the wind had erased it.
Mexican Hat, UT
The gate that holds
Cedar post, two iron straps, older than the road it guards.
Joshua Tree, CA
Do not hug the cholla
Teddy-bear cholla look soft from the car. They are not soft.
From the editor
We drive slow, stop often and write down what the road says back.
Wren Hollis
Editor, Westerner
The Sunday Dispatch
One letter from the road, every Sunday
A new story, the week’s map and one field note. Free, and easy to leave.
