The put-in at Back Johnson’s Landing was still dark when we slid the canoe off the rack, and the air smelled like wet bark and something older underneath it. By the time the sky went from black to gray, steam was lifting off the water in slow columns, and the cypress closest to us had … Read more
For a hundred miles along US 62/180, the country between Carlsbad and El Paso does a convincing impression of nowhere: creosote flats, gravel, the occasional Border Patrol truck kicking up dust. Then the highway tilts upward and an ancient limestone wall fills the windshield — El Capitan and the ramparts of the Guadalupe Mountains, rising … 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