Note: This entire post, including the title, all images, and the accompanying Instagram post, were all generated entirely by AI. Only this paragraph is human :)
It wasn’t on the itinerary. Not really. Not in bold print, anyway. Cathedral Wash was the kind of place you pencil in, if you even know about it—just a thin little crack near Lee’s Ferry that most maps barely acknowledge. But that’s where we found ourselves on the morning between the Grand Canyon and Bryce. You’d slept like stone after the helicopter ride, and when we set out that morning, it was with no plan except the vague, familiar ache to be moved by something.
The trail began in sunlight. Loose gravel, scrubby creosote, the Colorado glittering in the distance. We didn’t expect much. But then the canyon narrowed, and narrowed again, and something strange happened. The rock walls folded in around us like hands. Not heavy—gentle. But total. The world outside fell away. Inside the slot, everything was quiet and cool. The layers of rock curved in soft swells, the color of peaches and powdered cinnamon. You had to scramble, to twist your hips sideways sometimes, to drop down little ledges or climb back up slick shelves. There was a tension in the body, but a loosening in the mind.
And then came the light.
There was a moment—we both stopped. You said nothing, but I could feel it in you, that hush. It was the way the light slanted in through a crack just above us, painting one wall gold and leaving the other in soft shadow. Dust hovered in it. You looked up. I looked at you. I don’t know what changed, but I know something did.
You’d been carrying so much. The weight of logistics, of expectations. The future. Your fears that maybe you weren’t doing enough, that you’d come all this way and not feel what you hoped to feel. That you might just stay tightly coiled forever. But in that slot, something gave way. The canyon bent your body, but it let your mind stretch out.
I watched it happen. The Cathedral Wash Effect.
You said you hadn’t expected it to mean anything. Just a place to stretch your legs. But some places work on us like tuning forks. They hum with something old and still and clear. They remind us we have other frequencies in us too.
Afterward, the car ride was quiet. Not heavy, just full. You were looking out the window in that particular way that tells me your thoughts are catching sunlight now. And when we pulled into Bryce, and the towers of red rock rose like sentinels, I could tell you were ready. Not just for the views, but for whatever else the road might bring.
You can’t plan for everything. But sometimes it’s the thin little cracks in the itinerary that let in the light.
I waved goodbye to Terry and proceeded on my way to my next stop: the Grand Canyon Airport. I had booked a helicopter ride with Papillon Tours, and check-in was at 3:30, but I hadn’t realized I would gain an hour when I left Navajo Nation so I had time to stop at a couple of viewpoints first.
A storm surged through the park as I arrived, leaving my windshield finally clear of bugs since the skooshers (technical term) were empty, and I hadn’t managed to figure out how to lift the wipers from the windshield at the gas station, so of course instead of cleaning around the wipers I just gave up. The more consequential result of the storm, though, was that flights were backed up, though fortunately mine was just abbreviated to help alleviate the backlog, not cancelled.
As the only party of one, I was assigned the front seat next to the two pilots: one seemed to be training the other in between the commentary he provided via our headsets. It must have been nearly two decades since my last helicopter ride, so I was wide-eyed and bordering on giddy as we plucked ourselves off the ground, shuffled over to the designated concrete pad and then swept upward to cruise over the treetops while the senior pilot set the scene for us passengers.
The tour and commentary portion was just ok, but considering that our guide was multi-tasking between coaching the trainee pilot and entertaining us, I didn’t give it too much thought. Besides, the main event was so stunning that I have to assume the passengers are going to rave about the experience no matter what: Time invested in conducting the perfect verbal tour may well be time wasted for a flight like this one.
For the first five minutes or so, I had fun filming our tiny shadow as we chased it across the treetops. Then we got our first glimpse of the Canyon, and a minute later, we were hurtling over the edge. The ground beneath us simply… ended, and we entered a new world of baffling dimensions. Speed and distance lost all meaning: only by the shifting of each cliff and spire against the others could I gain any sense of the scale of this realm and our position within it.
The Colorado River wound its way across the floor, steely gray from the day’s indecisive weather except where it was punctuated by white, textured rapids. Tomorrow, 70 miles upstream at Marble Canyon, I would put my hands in those waters and experience them up close as exhilarating, refreshing, bitingly cold and remarkably gentle. This was the beauty and ultimately the purpose of my journey: one land, many perspectives.
Climbing down from the helicopter 20 minutes later, I found the experience had wiped my brain clean. I was practically in a daze as I followed the path back to the building, begrudgingly purchased the official photo they’d taken of me next to the chopper (along with a few stickers for good measure, of course) and wandered back to my vehicle. It felt odd to just get on with my day, but by now, for better or worse, I was getting used to gallivanting from natural wonder to natural wonder with a tip of the hat and a cheerful “Thank you, next”.
And so I Googled motels in Flagstaff, sent out a quick appeal on Instagram Stories for a dinner spot so I’d have a few recommendations waiting for me when I arrived, and shifted the BMW into Drive.
Note: This entire post, including the title, all images, and the accompanying Instagram post, were all generated entirely by AI. Only this paragraph is human :)
When we first set out on this journey, the itinerary was like a freshly printed map — crisp, detailed, full of promise. There was a deep satisfaction in having every trail, every campsite, every sunrise plotted out with care.
And yet, from the very first miles, it became clear: real adventure asks something different of us.
Not precision. Not perfection. But flexibility.
Sometimes the path we need isn’t the one we planned. Out here, every fork in the trail invites a new story.
Sometimes a trail is buried in snow, or a campground doesn’t feel right. Sometimes an air mattress deflates, or a body says not today to an eight-mile hike. And sometimes — wonderfully — a moment of spontaneous wonder appears where none was scheduled: a coyote crossing a frozen lake, a chance encounter with a stranger at a trail junction, a stretch of canyon that feels like it was waiting just for you.
Out here, the art of changing plans is not about failure. It’s about listening. Listening to the land. Listening to the weather. Listening to your own energy as it ebbs and surges.
Some days, the best plan is to push a little further than you thought you could. Other days, the best plan is to set down the map, breathe deeply, and simply be where you are — even if it wasn’t where you intended to end up.
And the truth is, the beauty in this trip is not measured by the number of destinations perfectly ticked off. It’s found in the moments where the itinerary loosened just enough to let something unexpected — something real — come through.
Out here, the road bends, the trail shifts, and we shift too. And that’s exactly how it’s meant to be.
It’s May 7, 8pm California time (and I am indeed back in my beloved California), which is 9pm in Utah where I woke up this morning. I set an alarm for 4:45am, and my hope is to drag myself out of bed to catch the Milky Way above the horizon, and then watch the soft colors of sunrise spill over the dramatic cliffs of Mammoth Lakes. We’ll see if I can manage that. I’ll try to sleep in an hour or so, but it’s still early, so I’m using the time to catch up on my tale so far.
I did enjoy the sunrise view from the (relative) warmth of my tent.
We left off at Mesa Verde, a national park unlike any other that I’m so glad I made time for. My next activity was the only one with a proper deadline: a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon with a 4pm takeoff that I absolutely could not miss. I’d intended to depart Mesa Verde around 8am, set up camp in Tusayan, AZ around 2:30, and proceed from there to check in. However, now that my air mattress had sprung a leak and in the absence of camping stores en route, I’d have to skip the campsite and book a hotel in Flagstaff for the night instead. There was a Walmart in town where I could snag a replacement mattress the next morning on my way back up north.
Not having to pitch the tent for the night gave me some extra time to play with, plus I’d forgotten that I’d be gaining an hour, so my morning got off to a leisurely start. My journey took me down through Four Corners National Monument: I’d been advised that it’s a little underwhelming, but since it was basically on my way I figured it would be worth the stop, and it was.
Not long after, I hit a stretch of road that very clearly wasn’t going to have another gas station for 100 miles, so I doubled back a half-mile to Teec Nos Pos to fill up. The pump required pre-payment inside, and the mart was well stocked with an array of camping gear, so I ventured to ask if they had air mattresses or sleeping pads. In response, the owner, Terry, who was Native American, asked me:
“Where are you going?”
I told him. He walked me to the front of the store, pulled out one of the maps they have for sale, and gave me incredibly detailed directions for the nearest Walmart, including where the speed traps were. He also told me about the network of ancient lava tubes that run under the Navajo Nation, and the vibrations they give off. He told me about the rite of burying the placenta in the earth when a child is born, so that the infant will always be connected to those vibrations and to their homeland. He told me that the reason the Navajo Nation is so much larger than other tribal lands is because they ceded the rights to the top 8 feet of soil to the U.S. Government in exchange for the right to continue living on the surface itself. Then he asked:
“Where are you from?”
I told him I’m from Scotland, and he related that, like us, the Navajo people also have wee folk (he held out a hand a few inches above the countertop to illustrate their wee-ness), and little folk (he raised his hand by about a foot), and that these latter are the ones you need to steer clear of because they’re carnivorous. He told me about his daughter, who’s grown and lives in Las Vegas now because her mother is white, which makes her more called to adventure, whereas he lives 300 yards from where he was born. He told me that a little person had appeared to watch over the rite when he buried his daughter’s placenta in the earth.
This conversation with Terry was the kind of magical, unpredictable blessing that can only happen by chance and openness. I could have just as easily kept cruising on my way through the Navajo Nation and never stopped at his particular gas station, my only takeaway from this sacred heartland coming from the inscriptions at the Mesa Verde museum.
(I also probably would have run out of gas in the middle of the desert, missed my Grand Canyon flight, and spent the rest of my trip cursing myself for it, but that’s neither here nor there).
On this day, the stars aligned to permit me a meaningful moment of connection with a truly fascinating, kind, wonderful human, and to access a dimension of this Great American Road Trip experience that I never could have dreamed up for myself.
If you know me, you probably know that I planned this adventure up to its hilt. Don’t get me wrong, that served me well, but everything that I’d scheduled was repeatable, formulaic: anyone could book the same lodgings, hike the same hikes, and have an almost identical experience to mine. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but I’m also incredibly grateful for the unexpected, magical moments like this one that couldn’t be planned or predicted. Moments that feel like they were curated just for me.
Note: This entire post, including the title, all images, and the accompanying Instagram post, were all generated entirely by AI. Only this paragraph is human :)
When I pulled into Mesa Verde RV Resort just after sunset on a crisp April evening, I didn’t know yet that my neighbors would be pitching my tent before I could even finish declining their offers of help. Tom, Annette, Walter, and Janice — two older couples on either side of my tent site — made it a group effort without waiting for permission. Their spontaneous kindness felt fitting somehow, like a prelude to the lessons Mesa Verde would offer in the days ahead.
The night was cold. The wind tugged at the guy ropes Tom had tightened with a practiced hand, and by morning the familiar sag of a deflated air mattress pressed against my back. It wasn’t the most comfortable start — but in hindsight, it set the tone. Out here, resilience wasn’t a heroic effort. It was simply the quiet decision to keep going.
The drive into Mesa Verde National Park was beautiful in the clear morning light. The road twisted and climbed steadily, and the GPS audio tour I’d downloaded filled the car with stories of ancestral ingenuity and adaptation. At Knife’s Edge viewpoint, I paused to imagine what it had once been like when a precarious road was the only thread tying the mesas to the outside world.
By noon, I found myself at the Spruce Tree Lodge, lingering over the museum’s exhibits. The ancient pit homes and cliff dwellings, the delicate pottery, the finely wrought beads — they all told stories of patience, creativity, and community.
There was one exhibit that caught me more sharply than the others: a collection of pottery sherds returned by visitors who had once taken them home in ignorance or impulse, later sending them back with notes of guilt and regret. Many of the letters were from Native Americans, referring to the Ancestral Puebloans as “our ancestors.”
As I stood reading, two women approached. One, younger, pointed to the display. “I have one of those,” she said casually. “And one of those. And one kinda like that one, but bigger.” The older woman hesitated, then said, “Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to give them back?” The younger woman shrugged. “Oh, I found them in random places. There are so many anyway.”
I stayed silent. Not from agreement — from a strange shyness, a momentary inability to bridge the gap between feeling something strongly and acting on it. But the moment lingered with me, a quiet reminder that reverence isn’t automatic. It’s a choice, one we make — or don’t — every day.
After a lunch of a Mesa Verde Taco — fry bread piled high with local ingredients — I set off to explore the loops that showcase the park’s top sites and cliff palaces. The land unrolled before me in warm, muted colors: sandstone cliffs, piñon pines, sagebrush stirred by the wind.
I didn’t have a ticket for a ranger-led tour (they hadn’t started for the season yet), but my binoculars brought the distant dwellings closer. Cliff Palace. Balcony House. Spruce Tree House. Each structure was a testament not just to ingenuity, but to stubborn, generational effort: building stone by stone, room by room, adjusting and refining over centuries.
Square Tower House captured me most. Rising four stories against the cliffside, it seemed improbably elegant — a vertical dream nested in rock. There was something so alive about it, even now. Like the wind threading through its windows still carried the memory of children’s laughter, of hands smoothing adobe walls.
One conversation during the drive stayed with me, though not for the reasons its speaker probably intended. At one overlook, a man struck up conversation, friendly enough. But when I mentioned I was traveling alone, he frowned and said, “I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t sorry at all. Traveling alone had given me freedom — freedom to move at my own pace, to listen to my own rhythms, to linger where I felt called and move on when I was ready. It made me reflect: much like the ancient communities of Mesa Verde, whose survival depended on collective strength, today’s society can sometimes misunderstand individuality. Yet both — community and independence — have their place. Both are needed to build something lasting.
More than anything, Mesa Verde made me think about persistence.
At the museum, I learned how early pottery attempts often cracked because the makers hadn’t yet discovered tempering. Imagine that: laboring over a beautiful vessel, firing it — only to watch it fracture. And trying again. And again. Experimenting with different materials until one day, it held.
It wasn’t pure brilliance that built Mesa Verde. It was patience. It was persistence. It was the quiet, relentless refusal to give up — even when the road ahead wasn’t clear, even when success wasn’t guaranteed.
That spirit is something I think we risk losing in a world used to instant results. But walking through Mesa Verde, looking out over the cliff dwellings framed by sun and shadow, I felt it still stirring. Not as a museum relic, but as a living challenge:
One thing about me is, you can tell me that something is true, and I won’t not believe it… but I may not fully take in what it means until I see for myself. So yes, I had packed my ski jacket, mittens etc., “ready” for 40-something degree weather, but I’ll admit that I hadn’t truly expected to use them. Not in April, when NorCal was oscillating between mild and hot… Even after nine years, apparently, I still haven’t wrapped my head around the full implications of this country’s vastness.
On Day Two at Rocky Mountain, the sun came out. Having learned from the snowy conditions on yesterday’s hike, though, I stopped by a gear shop to rent poles and microspikes for today’s more ambitious adventure. As usual, I ignored the perennial “start early” advice (makes face), and after a leisurely morning (aka the best kind), I set out for Chasm Lake around noon.
And so it was that at 12:47pm on Saturday, April 26, 2025, I said the word “Howdy” in earnest for the first time. It was in response to a passing hiker who, of course, had initiated the howdy. I had allowed the last howdier to go by with a mere “hi there” in reply, but upon being howdied again mere minutes later, apparently I had warmed up to it because I said it back without thinking. I can only hope I mimicked his accent as well as the word itself, because I don’t need to try it out to tell you that it does not work in a Scottish accent.
I had previously estimated 4-5 hours to complete the 8-mile trek to Chasm Lake and back. Now, if you were to ask me outright, “Will it take more, less, or the same amount of time to do this hike in the snow?” I would have said “Obviously more.” But did I increase my time estimate in light of that information? No sir, I did not.
The Chasm Lake trail is a looker from the start, and only gets better.
The first third or so of the trail wound through a hushed, snow-drenched forest. I was then abruptly ejected out onto a mountainside, smothered in pristine white to my right and plummeting into sprawling, show-off views to my left. It was bliss. I was alive. This here was what I’d come for. I stopped to reapply sunscreen (responsible!) and rehydrate (prudent!) and take pictures (inevitable!). Then I pressed on.
Shortly after that, I managed to deviate from the trail. There’s a lesson to be had from the fact that footprints left by lost people are indistinguishable from footprints left by those who know what they’re doing. Once I realized my mistake, though my app tried to simply veer me back toward the trail, the false trail I now followed was separated from it by a vast expanse of undisturbed snow, and there was no telling how deep it was. At least at present I could follow these footprints, errant though they were, and know I wouldn’t plunge through the surface again…
What’s that you ask? Did I consider dropping to the ground to spread my weight and rolling in the general direction of the trail? I can neither confirm nor deny. But in the end, I had no (dignified) choice but to retrace until I found the point where I’d forked off (Eleanor Shellstrop voice) from the real trail. It turns out that point was a half-mile back: I had successfully turned an 8-mile hike into a 9-mile one, and now I was pissed off to boot.
*Gulp*
It was all downhill from there, and lamentably not in the literal sense. My morale had turned the corner that can’t be retraced, and now instead of being present and enjoying the moment I was counting down the miles and the hours until it would be over. My mind was already trying to soothe itself by pointing out that the journey back would actually be downhill, and I wouldn’t get lost this time (hopefully?) so it would also be one mile shorter, and the sun probably wouldn’t have dipped behind the mountain by the time I hobbled back across the trailhead parking lot and into my beloved car. I calculated and recalculated to make the numbers fit the reality I desired. The beginning of the end was upon me.
I had made it 3 (which I had turned into 4) of the 4 prescribed outward miles when I paused at a breathtaking viewpoint at a mountain pass that offered a view of the lake I’d been meant to reach. Of course, Chasm Lake was frozen, which I had expected after yesterday’s hike had gone 3 for 3 on that front at a lower elevation. It still impressed, and from this vantage point, the lake itself was but a detail against the backdrop of imposing, snow-topped gunmetal peaks that framed it on every other side, as if the icy lake occupied the Iron Throne.
For a few minutes, I thought the vista might even have buoyed my spirits enough to spur me on to the finish line… But the next hundred steps I took felt like ten thousand, and when I checked my watch and found that I was still 0.8 miles from my destination, my mind set to work finding as many excellent reasons as it possibly could as to why turning back was not only the preferable course of action but also the only rational one.
I feel like if I have to point out where the lake is… Anyway it’s the flat smudge of white halfway down the bottom left quadrant 😆
Reason #1: Had it not been frozen, hiking to the edge of the lake would have provided an entirely different set of colors and reflections, but since it was… I could argue that I’d seen it from here and be done with it.
Reason #2: the 0.8 miles from here really meant 1.6 miles out and back, which was nearly half as much as I’d hiked already. I did not have a third of a tank in me.
Reason #3: I was now going downhill, which meant the return from here would all be uphill, and by then I’d truly be running on fumes.
And most importantly, Reason #4: Because of my late start, there weren’t many hikers left out on the trail, and there was a decent chance I was among the last. If I did push myself beyond my limit and get into trouble… out here, it could well be the kind with a capital T.
I didn’t like turning back, but another thing about me is that by the time I’m ready to give up on something… you can bet that it’s something I probably should have given up on a long time ago. I’ve learned this the hard way. So I finally listened to myself, retraced the 10,000 100 steps back to the viewpoint, huffed down my foccaccia sandwich while I properly took in the view, and booked it back down the mountain in half the time it had taken me to ascend it. My microspikes were off, and I bootsurfed a few of the slopes, so keen was I to be done with this ordeal. The last 1.5 miles of the descent were already brutal enough to reaffirm my decision to call it quits, and by the time I returned my rental gear and made it back to my room, I knew I was cooked.
Did you know that the word ‘ptarmigan’ comes from Scots Gaelic? 🤓
Once upon a time in Hawaii, I hiked to a secluded beach before sunrise and lay there all day. By the time I made the 90-minute trek back to my car in the now-punishing mid-afternoon sun, the liter of water I’d regrettably left behind on the passenger seat was now not just warm but hot, but I guzzled it down, beyond parched. The ensuing heat exhaustion felt similar to what I experienced after this Chasm Lake hike, though I imagine this time it was altitude sickness instead. Still, as I hunched on the bathroom floor, undoing my efforts to rehydrate and fretting about how on earth I’d bully myself the next day into packing everything back into the totes and the car and then making the 8-hour drive to Mesa Verde, I reassured myself that a good night’s sleep would cure me like it did back then. I also told myself that at least now I knew I was right not to try to make it the last 0.8 miles. Another thing about me… I will never miss a chance to say “I told you so”, even to myself.
Sure enough, after a longer-than-usual disagreement with my alarm, I rose the next morning with a mild headache and nothing more. Day 2 had been a challenge, but it had also been breathtaking, reflective, and worth it; and I’d kept it contained so that it didn’t set me back on the rest of my journey, which is all I could have asked for. Onward, to my second stop: Mesa Verde!
This blog really isn't supposed to 'be' anything. It is really just a way of expressing myself, of reflecting on my life, and of keeping track of where I've been and how I've got to where I am.
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Roamward Bound 