The day before the eclipse, the Middle Fork Cafe in Lander, Wyo., was bustling at lunchtime, the usual crowd of Sunday locals and Yellowstone-bound tourists vastly swelled by twosomes and families of eclipse chasers. They were on their way somewhere else: Lander was right on the edge of totality. If you’d already traveled hours or days to get there,...
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There wasn’t much selection among the postcards, and I picked a standard canyon scene, the rock walls and sloping scree slopes careening up high over the river and somehow all squeezed inadequately onto a four-by-six rectangle obviously far too small for the grandeur of the canyon but bigger than a standard postcard so that you had to fill up more space...
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I was at about 11,000 feet when the last of the sunlight vanished. That’s where the trail grows steep and the trees begin to give out, the bristlecone pines and subalpine firs increasingly stunted and wind-sculpted. That’s also the elevation where I always feel the thinning atmosphere, and have to stop more often to pant. But from here there was no...
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I never thought speaking German would come in handy in the Southwest. Wouldn’t learning Spanish have been more useful? But I’d been in Arizona only a couple of years when I found out about an intriguing job: drive vanloads of German-speaking tourists around the Southwest, guiding them on hikes in the national parks. I signed on at once. It was far better...
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You know it when you see it. There it is, gathering again on the bookshelves and under the bed. It crunches between your teeth on windy days. You feel it underfoot while walking to the patio; wipe it off the windowsill with a moistened rag; scrawl “Wash Me” on the back of a delivery truck that’s been down a rural road. Everyone knows it....
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