Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Trona, California

In the morning, the phone rang and the recorded voice said, "The bad news is, its 4 AM, but the good news is, we got coffee in the lobby."

At 4:10 AM, the coffee was cold, and so was my car as I was racing north. 14 songs later, I was among the snow and Joshua Trees and the gnarled pines of the Sierra Nevada's, and soon I was at the base of the tallest mountain in the Contiguous 48, just as the sun was peeling over Utah, and it blessed the clouded storming slopes with a brilliant spectrum of purple and orange.

I drove further up the road, into the brown and black Alabama Hills. They are a range of millions of rocks, some rising 50 feet in the sky with no apparent relation to any other rock other than that they were all rounded and smooth; like a sketch for some science fiction set.

I drove up as far as the Mount Whitney road would take me. When the snow overtook the road, I got out of the car. No one was here. I was the only person in twenty miles, at the base of Mount Whitney, and not a soul in this entire country, was here to enjoy it with me. So on my way back, I bought gas, a Snapple, a Coke, two powerbars and I was headed for Los Angeles. I thought about Neal Casady (the driver at the wheel), who travelled through this back country and became the source of our modern road myths.

In the old days, travellers would talk about the old mountain man they met, or the crazy hermit along the river. The world has changed, and so have our stories. Neal Casady made a myth out of Route 66, the lonely highways of America, and made it okay for a modern tale to be told. Travelling across America today - is - different.

Our old hermit is replaced with potion-toting wicka practitioners, space-cadet accountants and sedentary desert dwellers. But that is the way it really is - on the road, and the only way you can avoid a story like this - is to edit or exaggerate, or just stay home. You can never find the richness of America in an Orange County country club, or a Los Angeles water bar. It is out here, amid the bleakness of the ghetto, the white trash and the cold mountains.

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