There’s a specific week in late September when I stop pretending summer is coming back. The forecast app on my phone starts showing overnight lows in the thirties for the mountain towns I like to camp in, and I pull up the average first-frost date for my zip code the way other people check football … Read more
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
The first time I went apple picking as an adult, I got it completely wrong. It was the second weekend of October, I’d read exactly one blog post, and I showed up to a Hudson Valley orchard at eleven in the morning expecting Honeycrisp. What I got was a parking field the size of a … Read more
Ask ten people when to visit Door County and eight of them will say July. That’s exactly the problem. In July, Wisconsin’s Thumb — that 75-mile peninsula pinched between Green Bay and Lake Michigan — belongs to everyone from Chicago, and the line at the fish boil stretches past the picnic tables. By the second … 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
Every late September, my crew and I spread maps across the same scratched dining table and argue about October. This year the argument ended early. The vote was unanimous: Hocking Hills, the pocket of sandstone gorges an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio, that somehow still flies under the radar of leaf-season travelers who assume New … 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 parking lot at Lake of the Clouds was full by 8:40 on a Saturday morning, and nobody in it seemed to mind waiting. We stood three deep at the rail in light gloves and September breath, watching a valley the size of a small city burn quietly in every direction — maple red, birch … Read more
There’s a spot on the north side of Champaign, Illinois, wedged between two interstates, where roughly half a million sunflowers show up for a few weeks each summer and then vanish. No ticket booth. No parking fee. No gift shop funneling you toward the exit. Just a field planted in the shape of something — … Read more