The first thing you notice on M-119 north of Harbor Springs is what’s missing. No center line. No shoulder worth the name. Just two narrow lanes of asphalt slipping under a canopy of maple, beech, oak, and hemlock that closes overhead like the entrance to somewhere older than Michigan’s tourist brochures admit. My co-driver had … Read more
Las Vegas runs out of buildings about forty minutes after you leave it. The slot machines give way to Joshua trees, the radio gives way to static, and then the road tips down into Eldorado Canyon and there it is: Nelson, Nevada, population small enough that the welcome sign seems optimistic. We had loaded the … Read more
The forecast said the high country around Crested Butte was flipping, so my crew and I pointed the truck west out of town before sunrise, thermoses full, headlamps still in our pockets. By the time the sun cleared the ridgeline above Kebler Pass, we understood why people drive a thousand miles for this. An entire … Read more
Somewhere around the second week of October, the American travel machine points itself at New England, lets the national parks empty out, and starts drafting gift guides. Death Valley National Park spends that same week quietly turning its lights back on. The Inn at Furnace Creek, dark through the worst of the heat, reopens for … Read more
The clock in the rental read 5:41 a.m. when I pulled out of Lincoln, New Hampshire, with a thermos hissing in the cupholder and my headlights the only ones pointed east on Route 112. My photographer was still assembling her tripod in the passenger seat, and neither of us said a word, because there was … Read more
Three summers in a row, I drove Highway 1 through Big Sur and saw absolutely nothing. That’s not an exaggeration. The marine layer in July sits on that coast like a wet blanket someone forgot to take off — you get 400 feet of visibility, a gray Bixby Bridge, and a souvenir shop’s worth of … Read more
Some drives earn their keep with mileage. The loop out of Stuart, Florida — across the St. Lucie River, over the Sewall’s Point peninsula, up the spine of Hutchinson Island, and back to the mainland at Jensen Beach — barely covers a dozen miles of actual road. You could finish it in half an hour … Read more
There is a moment, somewhere around 9:25 on the last Friday of September, when the crowd stops being a crowd. Twenty thousand people who have been drinking coffee and stamping warmth into their boots since dawn suddenly go quiet, all at once, because someone on a ridge three-quarters of a mile away has lifted a … Read more
Every cross-country driver eventually has to deal with St. Louis. You can skirt it on the outer ring, sure, but if your route puts you anywhere near the middle of the country, odds are you’ll thread the needle where the Mississippi bends west and the Gateway Arch rises out of the riverfront like a silver … Read more
There is a stretch of the Sierra Nevada where the calendar stops mattering and elevation starts running the show. Every September, while New England is still arguing about whether October will behave, the aspens on the eastern slope of the Sierra turn gold in a wave that starts above nine thousand feet and works its … Read more