Notes from places I've spent time in lately. A geographer who studies cities at planetary scale still notices the small things on the ground.
Many Glacier keeps a rustic, historic beauty — the old lodges, the lakes sitting flat under the peaks — and it carries the whole way over Going-to-the-Sun Road. What we had not planned for was the smoke. Wildfire haze pushing down from Canada flattened every ridgeline into pale grey layers, and on the worst days the far shore of Lake McDonald simply was not there. It cleared in patches, and those patches were extraordinary.
This is mostly a food album, which is a fair record of the trip. Chicago rewards eating your way across it — tempura, lamb over coals, a steak still crackling when it landed, sushi, stew in a bread bowl. The architecture will keep until next time.
Four stops in one run: the Grand Canyon rim, Zion, the hoodoos at Bryce, and Horseshoe Bend. March is the right month for it — thin crowds, cold mornings, and light that holds its edge all day. Somewhere around the second overlook the scale stops being an abstraction.
We went for the foliage and caught it at peak: whole hillsides turning at once, lakes ringed in orange, and a white clapboard church in a Vermont village that looked staged and was not. Boston at the end of it felt like stepping back indoors.
Yellowstone first — the Lower Falls dropping into its canyon, Grand Prismatic laid out in bands of colour — then south into the Tetons, where the range comes straight out of the sagebrush with nothing in front of it. The Moulton barn on Mormon Row is photographed a thousand times a day and is still worth stopping for.
Alpine lakes still holding snow on the far shore, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which is narrower and far darker than any photograph makes it look. June is when the high country has only just opened.
San Francisco by cable car, then Yosemite under winter light with Half Dome and El Capitan clear of cloud, then the sequoias — General Sherman is the largest tree on Earth by volume, and the number does not prepare you for standing under it. Nevada at the end.
A national park wrapped around a working town, which is unusual: you step off the bathhouse row straight onto forest trails. Early October had the Ouachitas just beginning to turn, and the tower on the mountain puts the whole of Hot Springs underneath you.
Thanksgiving on Okanagan Lake, with Kelowna strung along the far shore and the hills behind it. Bare trees, early dark, the town lit up by five — a quieter version of a place built for summer, which was the point.
The first trip out west. Bison grazing at the roadside, the falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and the Tetons appearing through cloud over the Snake River. Most of what we have done since has been a way of coming back to this.
The same June run, carried east: Devils Tower standing alone out of the grassland, Mount Rushmore, and then the Badlands, which read less like landscape than like something still under construction.
