On our journey through the American West, it’s about time to mosey into California, America’s most populous state by far. To give you an idea of just how popular this “land of milk and honey” became, California is only 1½ times bigger than another western state — Wyoming — but it has 74 times more […]

You get your history first in this posting. The oft-told stories of America’s development often paint an incomplete picture. Schoolkids learn how the British, French, and Dutch colonized the East Coast of North America; about the slow but steady subjugation of native tribes there and beyond the Appalachian Mountains; of Spanish missionaries’ seeding the faith […]

Is a grain of sand just a tiny rock? If so, we’re about to leave red-rock Utah, about which I’ve been writing, for the rockiest state in the Union. Nevada, largely an uninhabited, alkali wasteland pocked with gambling and golf resorts but mostly ramshackle towns built around a few gas stations, taverns, and cafés, is […]

Writing, as I did last posting, about Utah — an American state named after the Ute Indians, the “People of the Mountains” who once controlled that territory west of the main spine of the Rockies —brings back a vivid memory. Carol and I were interviewing and photographing at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the state […]

The Rocky Mountain states that I’ve been describing in this blog over the past several weeks project a breathtaking majesty when their massive, snow-covered mountains are beheld from the arid flatlands below. But while its Wasatch Range is formidable enough to have hosted the Winter Olympics eight years ago, one of those states displays an […]

A few weeks ago, I devoted a blog to the enchanting state of Colorado. But we must tramp that way again on our current excursion through the Endless West. So I’ll offer a few more glimpses of what seems like the “Top of the World” when you’re winding among Colorado’s “14ers” ― the 53 Rocky […]

As you’ve read in my recent posts, the American West is a crazy quilt of regions, beginning with rolling grasslands and lonely prairies and extending westward across a spine of high mountains, wasteland plateaus and wide deserts to the sea. The East had been largely settled, and fully developed cities bustled along the Pacific Coast. […]

I’m beginning a new regimen today, aimed at increasing the frequency and reducing the length of these blogs. It’s a challenge, since I can really get cranking on these stories from across America. Quite a few foreign students of the English language have praised the extended narratives, colloquial insights, and word definitions as delicious, five-course […]

Saddle up! We leave Texas in our dust on our trip through the vast American West. Time to head north, across the Red River into Oklahoma. Boomtown The West is full of ghost towns, once abuzz with miners, merchants, and even fancy concert halls with gas lamps and red-flocked wallpaper, then abandoned to the elements […]