Road Trips, National Parks & Backroads

Wander The Road: Road Trips, Ghost Towns, National Parks, and the Weird Stuff in Between

The Mountains Are Calling: My Origin Story

August 23, 2026 No Comments

A reflection this week rather than a trip. I have been thinking about where all of this actually started, and it turns out it started twice.

I was just out in Colorado for a concert. We went out ahead of it and spent the day before and the morning of driving around parts of the state we had not seen. The Lariat Loop and Golden and the towns strung along it, stopping for whatever looked worth stopping for. Then Boulder the next day. I did not expect how much being up there would make me miss it. The smell of it, the air, the way it feels to be in that country, all of it came back at once and I was not ready for that. Somewhere in the middle of all that driving I started thinking about the first time I ever came out here.

Adventures August 21, 2026

Follow the Brown Sign

A friend sent me an Instagram reel the other day about how you can tell which side of the highway you are on just from the signs. It…

Old Wood Barn off I-70 highway in the middle of Kansas

20 Years Later August 7, 2026

20 Years Later – Day Six: The Long Road Home

We started the last day just outside Mesa Verde with a long way to go. Kansas City was the goal, the whole southwest corner of Colorado and everything…

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Toyota 4Runner overlanding setup named Finn in the Loess Hills Mills County Iowa

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Driving through the Valley of the Gods Utah

August 9, 2026

20 Years Later: A 2006 Southwest Road Trip

Twenty years ago, in 2006, my brother Alex and I pointed his car east out of Arizona and took the long way home. One week, six states, and a little under fifteen hundred miles of national parks, monuments, and roadside stops. Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, with plenty of good

Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling set into a sandstone alcove at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado

August 2, 2026

Mesa Verde National Park – Colorado

The History of Mesa Verde National Park Mesa Verde sits in the southwestern corner of Colorado, in Montezuma County, up on a high tableland cut by deep canyons. Mesa Verde is Spanish for green table. At 52,485 acres it protects more than 5,000 known archaeological sites, including about 600 cliff dwellings, which makes it the

The East and West Mitten Buttes rising from the desert at Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

August 2, 2026

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park – Arizona and Utah

The History of Monument Valley Monument Valley sits on the Arizona and Utah border, on Navajo Nation land. It is the landscape most people have in mind when they think of the American Southwest, tall red sandstone buttes standing alone on an open desert floor, the largest of them rising about 1,000 feet. The rock