Alex Mercer 
Some of the best meals I have ever eaten involved a camp stove, two plastic bowls, and a parking spot at the edge of nowhere. But somewhere between the hundredth lap of eating off my knees and the time a bowl of chili ended up in my lap thanks to a passing truck, I admitted … Read more
By ten o’clock on the last night of October, Oaxaca smells like marigolds, copal smoke, and frying dough. Brass bands are working their way up streets you thought you knew, entire families are picnicking beside gravestones under thousands of candles, and nobody — not one person — is wearing a costume. They’re wearing photographs pinned … Read more
The last airport tea I ever bought cost $6.25, and I never got to drink it hot. O’Hare, Terminal 3, a January delay stretching from forty minutes to four hours. I stood in a coffee line long enough to memorize the menu, paid airport money for what is legally just hot water and a paper … Read more
The text came in at 4:47 on an October afternoon, from a stretch of the Wind Rivers where the nearest cell tower might as well be in another century: Standing water on the plateau. Watching the ceiling. Will move when it lifts. Fourteen words, beamed off a fist-sized device to a satellite 1,200 miles up, … Read more
There’s a moment on US-385, somewhere south of Marathon, Texas, when the last radio station collapses into static and the road ahead just… keeps going. No billboard, no gas station, no cell bars. Just asphalt stitched across a desert that looks genuinely empty until you learn how to read it. That’s the drive into Big … Read more
There is a particular kind of dread that arrives around 6 p.m. at a boondocking spot: you are filthy, the sun is dropping, and the only water in the van is exactly as cold as the mountain air outside. For my first two years of van life I solved this the way most people do … Read more
Eleven days after I returned a midsize SUV in Albuquerque, an envelope showed up with photographs of a rear bumper, a magnified scratch, and an invoice for $1,124.50. The scratch was real. It just wasn’t mine. I had watched that same bumper for ten minutes in the rental lot, camera rolling, before I drove a … Read more
There is a moment on the tundra outside Churchill, Manitoba, when your guide kills the engine of a two-ton vehicle, and the only sound left is wind coming off Hudson Bay with nothing between it and you except the curve of the planet. Somewhere out there, usually within a hundred meters of where you’re sitting, … Read more
Twelve months ago, I did something mildly irresponsible with company money: I bought three of the cheapest hardshell luggage sets I could find, handed them to my research crew, and told them to travel like people who don’t care about their bags. Checked bags on budget carriers. Overstuffed shells dragged across cobblestone. One set even … Read more
Most observation towers make you earn the view the same way: a narrow metal staircase, a hundred steps of huffing, and a cattle-line at the top. Eagle Tower in Door County, Wisconsin, took one look at that tradition and built something else entirely. The centerpiece of the climb here isn’t a staircase at all. It’s … Read more