I took some family members hiking recently to see if we could locate Native American rock art in the foothills near town. A year earlier I’d dropped a pin in Google Maps after spotting a stray AllTrails post. Sure enough, after a steep ascent, we found it—petroglyphs...
In June and July, only the earliest risers catch the quietest hour. Pre-dawn. First light. Morning’s earliest names belong to those who trade sleep for stillness. A pink sky rises like a whispered promise—renewal, energy, the courage to start again. I spent the last...
This year, my area went ninety-six days without measurable precipitation. By now, we’d typically have around five inches. Instead, trails turned dusty, poufs of grit rising with each step, working into shoes and socks, coating shins and calves. Grass withered to...
Step from sunlight into shade on a summer day, and your body knows the difference before your mind can name it. The air cools. Colors mute. Edges soften. You breathe more deeply. Shade feels so cool—but how much cooler is it, really? On a hot, dry day, it can be 15 to...
People around me often speak, but I don’t hear them—or at least not clearly. It’s not that I’m deaf. It’s that I’m elsewhere. My mind loops its own soundtrack—unfinished to-do lists, worries I forgot to shelve, or conversations I’m still having with someone who isn’t...
In the American West, water is never just water. It is inheritance, leverage, and law. It has been bought, sold, diverted, fought over, and rationed. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” Wendell Berry once wrote. In the West, that’s...
