Cross Country 2005 (Catching You Up: 4 of 11)

I'm a sucker for a few clichés associated with the American experience. Driving cross country is one of them. After I graduated from college, my good friend, Sam Foy, and I took off in her Honda CRV... California-bound. We survived a flash-flood in South Dakota; a cooking mishap in Redwood National Park; the odometer rollover of 100K miles in Denver; and my growing of a very sketchy mustache in Oregon that finally got shaved 24 long hours later in a poorly lit latrine in a campsite in California. Throughout all our adventure and misadventures, my new Canon DSLR was there documenting our days, and teaching me more about the composition, lighting, and landscapes.

The above photograph is a stretch of road in Yellowstone National Park approximately an hour after sunrise. To our right (out of view) was a huge herd of bison.

For most of our drive down Oregon's Coastal Highway, we were wrapped in a thick blanket of fog. For a few hours during our last 20 miles in Oregon, the sun cleared and we got our first true glimpse at the vast Pacific. The light that day was legendary. On the shore below a lone woman flew a kite.

Bryce Canyon looked completely fabricated, almost like a realist painter's depiction of the real thing. The color was as if some giant paintbrush slathered the rock formations (hoodoos) with paprika. We were only in Bryce for a day and a half, and I don't remember enough about how this place came to be (it has something to do with frost-wedging and a long, long duration of time). What I do remember after seeing a place like Bryce is how absolutely lucky I felt to be able to call this diverse and beautiful country my home.