Drawn the Road Again

Tag: mountains

  • Summer of Solitude

    Summer of Solitude

    Even though parks and other road-trip destinations are beginning to open back up, my family and I are choosing to extend our self-quarantine for as long as we can, to help minimize the risk of spreading the virus. But that doesn’t mean I can’t host a virtual summer road trip instead! Since so many of…

  • Quarantesima from quarantine

    Quarantesima from quarantine

    Sorry about the non-English post title—I realize it may need a bit of explaining. Italian is my other language, and since we’ve all heard the word “quarantine” a zillion times lately, this title just popped into my head. “Quarantine” comes from the Italian word quarantena, which means a period of forty days. It comes from…

  • The long detour

    The long detour

    I spent nearly all of April breaking in my new car with a 6500-mile road trip up and down the West Coast. I’ve done many similar trips in the past, but this one had a completely different feel to it. And that’s because the severe drought—which for more than seven years had parched California and…

  • Hope floats

    Hope floats

    I spent the whole weekend digging through dozens of old sketchbooks, searching for something I could post as some sort of post-election metaphor. Something that stood for a new day, for rising above the hateful muck we’re all slogging through…something. Anything. Welp. Yeah. It’s corny, I know. On that morning last year I thought seriously…

  • Alien forest

    Alien forest

    I visited Saguaro National Park for the first time last year, and between being a veteran national parks tourist and seeing a zillion photos of the place over the years, I thought I knew what to expect. Aaaand of course, I was way wrong. (No surprise there.) For one thing, Mary-Alice and I arrived in…

  • Sister sites

    Sister sites

    On our way up to the Grand Canyon for our second day at the park, the Tailor and I decided to swing through a trio of national monuments located a short detour away, just outside of Flagstaff, AZ. Since what is arguably the most famous national park lies just down the road, these sites tend…

  • Our best idea

    Our best idea

    Mt. Rainier National Park, WA Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. All of America seems to be celebrating right now, and rightly so. In my opinion, our wildest pockets are our true national treasures, and our national parks, as Wallace Stegner said, our best idea. Olympic National Park, WA So since…

  • Purple haze

    Purple haze

    Here in the Northwest, we’re in the thick of my favorite season right now. I don’t mean summer, per se, but lavender season. Our climate is pretty much perfectly suited to growing lavender, so other than maybe the south of France, there’s no better place to stand on a purple hillside, awash in scent.

  • Hitching posts for Harleys

    Hitching posts for Harleys

    I’ve mentioned before that I always seem to end up in the Black Hills right in the middle of the Sturgis Rally. Well, last summer I didn’t just sneak by on the highway—I jumped right into the fray. My destination wasn’t Sturgis proper, but rather nearby Deadwood, that infamously lawless frontier town of yore. I…

  • The long view

    The long view

    On the morning I did this sketch, I was supposed to be sitting in a darkened lecture hall, listening to a bunch of scholars talk about art. But I just couldn’t do it. On a day like that, it seemed criminal to pass up such a beautiful place. So I jumped in the car and…