One: two-tracks, the dusty, lonely roads that follow the contours of the West. The one above reminds me of a long-ago hike taken from the low road to Zuni.
Two: hiking high and wild, to beat the heat and get up where breathing is a pleasure. Lately that has meant the Jemez Mountains, raked over by wildfires but springing up green with the monsoon rains. We just missed the wild raspberries: the bears got there first.
We followed the ridge for a while, then dropped into the dry gorge. Seasonal flash floods had carved an amphitheater, huge, cool, and dim. The east rim, where the low sun struck, was brilliant yellow against the cobalt sky.
The floods had rolled big stones around and around until they drilled deep holes into the bedrock. One shaft was nine feet deep. How many millennia of intermittent rains does it take to scour a pit like that?
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 