The American West

Nevada Basin and Range, #3. Highway 50, Nevada (Near Hickison Petrogylphs), 2017

Ah, the landscapes of the American West. I have a love affair going on with that zone of extreme geographic contortions and distortions. It’s canyons, slick rock, skies, clouds, mountains, rivers, basin and range undulations, forests, and all creatures contained therein, large, small, venomous and not (though the West does desperately need more wolves, lynxes, wolverines, jaguars, black-footed ferrets, and grizzlies)…

A West of not too many human beans, thank God.

Yet.

I’m off on a CO-CA-AZ circuit of nearly 4,000 miles in barely ten days to visit family in one last nostalgic embrace of the West (and of family and friends) before heading off to new and much more citified digs in Barcelona, Spain.

Or would that be Barcelona, Catalunya?

From one divided country to another, I am fond of saying lately. From the Divided States of America to the Bourbon-occupied principalities of the Spanish Empire. Interesting times, these.

But first, one last embrace of the land that is in my bones.

Somewhere near the Utah-Nevada border on a lazy, autumn-cirrus afternoon. This is trilobite country for those who collect such fossils:

Nevada Basin and Range, #1, Highway 50, Nevada, 2017