The day I arrived it was 120F warmer than where I was coming from.  Now at the end of March, the ground soaks up so much sunlight that this place is like a thermal battery, absorbing energy during the day and radiating it out after dark.

Another year condensed into a single entry. The goal now is to break this habit. But art school isn’t even half over, and I’m only now in Beginning Painting and learning what acrylics can do. So, it’ll be a long term goal.

Something new here - a whole year in one blog entry from pictures and notes I’ve taken throughout the year. Concise. Novel. Not lazy, I swear. But I hardly have time to reflect and put together these entries in the way I’d like.

Every place on Earth receives roughly the same amount of daylight per year, and it’s time for us to pay our debt after endless summer sun showers. The last plants are starving for it.

They’re practicing flying circles around the field, and soon they’ll write their seasonal goodbyes in a medium of earth with footprints in mud.

I came to this glacier after watching a UAF summer lecture by a local painter, Klara Maisch, who was presenting her field painting process. Even in -30F this girl will go out and paint (but only with oils because acrylics will freeze), staying multiple days in a location to capture all the detail. Amazing. And shameful for me, as I so often huddle next to the car’s heater vents as I wait for the light to change before dashing outside to set up the tripod and camera.

After an entire day flying and driving I arrive at a place that feels familiar to where I started.  There’s permafrost and plants here that are usually found above the Arctic Circle. A nearby pamphlet explains why: every 1,000 feet of elevation gain is the equivalent to traveling 600 miles north. And at the edge of this tree line in the Colorado Rockies stands another wonder, the vanguard of the forest below, the bristle-cone pine. Though this grove isn’t as old as the one in California that holds Methuselah, the tree that’s been living since 2833 BC, these ones are still ancient. Standing next to them I sense the presence of the extraordinary.

I’m back home now and here to stay for a bit. I love this place - the impossibly verdant summer greenery that lasts just a few breaths of awe, the shadow-casting moonlight of winter, the people that are so delightfully weird and make me feel like I’m in good company. But it leaves with me a soul-wrenching question - what do I do with this travel blog now? I do love keeping up with it, frustrating as it it as times. I love choosing the pictures, working the layout, writing a monologue to express what a picture can't capture, all to provide some concept of what the journey was like. I’d pick the experiences that would stick out the most from when I was staying in one place a month.

Motorcycling.

It's like snowboarding: carving into turns, riding moguls in the slopes, watching mountains of unbroken green crest over you as you near towering over the incoming turn.  And as you near, the mountain disappears as a wave of green tree canopy overtakes it and washes over the closing sky.

I've never been to these mountains before, but one of my first memories are of it.  I was in third grade and had proudly answered a question asking what mountain range spanned the east coast, but I didn't quite know the name of it and I called them the Application Mountains. The whole class erupted in laughter at me. Now, on about the 30th anniversary of that experience, I find myself in quaint little Bryson City which is nestled into one of the many valleys of this range.

I love Atlanta. The whole city is smiling and laughing today. A girl broke out into dance in the parking lot of a Kroger when an SUV with a bumping system passed by. It’s a black neighborhood I’m staying in, and it’s got it’s own distinct sense of culture from a few miles over where it’s white. I haven’t seen this type of racial segregation along the coast yet, and it reminds me of the Indian villages in Alaska or the reservations of the Lower 48. There are two competing theories on how our species will evolve (assuming we don’t blow up the planet first). One is that we’ll continue to be separate, the other is that we’ll all be one race. Maybe the outlying communities are evidence for the former, the melting pot of downtown evidence for the latter.

I’m watching people come and go in a constantly changing cast and cross-section of American life.  Some are happy and others sad, some are old and some are not, some are cowboys and others have gadgets, some have a smart look about them and others look like they watch a lot of TV. But all are farmers of emotion, each stirring in equal measure the heart and mind as I watch them leave and contemplate how life is like a house party, and one by one your friends leave until you're left sitting alone, waiting. 

The chap working in the self-checkout at the grocery store tells me that the first microwaves hit the market in ‘73, and the first brand of TV dinners was Banquet. Fascinating! I informed him that Banquet is shit. I’m more of a Marie Calendar Mac ‘n Cheese guy myself and proudly show him the box I got. He agrees with me and says his go-to is the Spaghetti by the same, and he accentuates it with slices of cheddar. I like him.

Land of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band, corn bread and sweet tea, Mark Twain and William Faulkner, the American Civil War. The Civil War was a foreign war as Alaska had been claimed as part of a European country, Russia, for decades by the time the first shells fell on Fort Sumter. It was still tucked away from the world stage, and first contact between the people of the interior valleys and outside traders was still happening.

I dodged a bullet on this trip. The original plan was to ride the Yamaha from Texas to the Alabama coast, but a frigid cold front descended all the way from my home and found me here. The cold spirit misses me. The temperature plummeted to a fatal 20F where any patch of ice could be the end for a motorcyclist. But as it happens a friend had a truck in Texas that they needed to bring to the exact same little coastal Bama town I booked a BnB in for next month.

Montgomery, Texas. The b&b is a delightful and quaint little shack in a tiny neighborhood nestled in the forest. The elderly host is one of the fastest texters I know and communicates in emojis, but this knack for technology hasn’t stopped her from leaving a delightful binder on the desk of printed MapQuest directions to local attractions. I go to museums to see old things, but sometimes I have to remind myself to just look around too. And all the furniture is miniature, sized to her sub-5ft stature and leaves me feeling like Gandolf in a hobbit house.

I haven’t been dry since October.

For weeks I’ve been moist and oily on Padre Island, the longest barrier island of hundreds from Mexico to Maine. It’s only a mile wide in most parts, yet 113 miles long. And it’s always damn humid and I’m having to constantly clean rust from the bike chain which has become a real chore.

What a fucking day.

The weather forecast for tomorrow put the fear into me with talk about the last thing a biker wants to hear when traveling cross country: severe thunderstorms. Yeah, not doing that. I’m leaving Colorado tonight.

Rain drops smacked into the Jeep's windshield as Savage Garden blasted from the speakers and we made our way to the valley of old mining equipment. Torrents of pouring rain fell onto the abandoned buildings and cascaded down rusted valleys of corrugated metal into the remnants of gutters.