J - The beauty of the west

'To appreciate the beauty of the west you have to get over the color green'. It's true, you do. You also have to get over towering mountains, glaciers, rivers, valleys, little streams flowing over ancient granite, cool forests, fertile flood plain, windy coastline. The West has none of these things. The landscape is just overbearingly flat with straight roads and short grass.

The beauty of the west is in the animals, people and experiences, a 40 year old man with a single shattered tooth is not embarrased about it but desperate to share the experiences of the road. A pronghorn that stamps around for a moment offended that we are camping in his desert and then, bored, runs away. Just after sunrise the desert is cool and bright for few minutes before the sun strikes. A bird that can fly backwards, floating in the wind. Little prairie dogs barking in the evening and the fat old sun going down in the sky.

Of course this is all very hard to appreciate at 114 deg. I think that beauty probably goes and hides under a rock until the sun sets when this happens. So it's lucky that we missed out on todays forecasted temperature by riding into an enormous prairie fire which blotted out the sun.