Photo by Mark Cunningham I saddle, mount, and boot the horse forward toward a deeply cut path of fringed roots and barren mesquites. Thorns and limbs reach upward and out like the clawed arthritic hands of an old witch. The sky begins to blow. Shake. Fade. A gunshot echoes. Shadows stretch and twist and lean in, searching for a foothold. A stronghold. A victory. Over what, I don't know. I dismount and lead the horse, my white knight against the dark emptiness. His focus is st

A month ago, I stood under the snow-covered peaks of Little Hatchet, gazing at the distant crest of her big brother, the sky heavy with wind and rain and dust. Mud everywhere. Little Hatchet Mountains, New Mexico Next to me there was a man in a car, no – a truck, one of those which carries its own power. Self-sufficient. Shaggy beard, wandering speech. A dog tucked in beside him. Waiting. A day hiker, I thought. Homeless, I thought. An attorney. A philosopher. A man waiting f

In 1903, a man named Wilson Bentley attached a camera to his microscope and took pictures of individual snowflakes. He was the first to do so, and through his pictures we came to realize no two snowflakes are alike. I find his photographs amazing. Snowflakes form, of course, when warm air collides with another air mass or weather front and condensation takes place. But the water must have something to adhere to, so it grabs hold of bacteria or dust in the air, and upon freezi

In the whitewash of midday, the land looks the same. Dry, hot, barren rolling hills and steep cliffs. But in dusk, in the shadows of a pastel sunset, the land comes alive. Each cliffside, each mountain differentiates from the other. The smallest of indentions make the biggest shadows. The harshest mountains turn velvet. This is a land where 80 feels like 90 and clothes must be shed along the way - but at least it's a dry heat, or so they say. This is a land where you wake up

At Santa Elena Canyon, I am the only one – for a moment at least. It has become a difficult thing to find in this park, solitude, unless one goes off map of course. Something I am prone to do often, but not today. Today I sit, in the middle of the resting Rio Grande. Today I sit, between the ever present yet-to-be and the ever present what was. Today I sit, just out of reach of walls so hardened by the past it takes a torrential river to bring them home, back into the earth o

I am not a historian, never have been. My degree stops at the simple baccalaureate and the only dates I have memorized are those of my own unfortunate aging and the anniversaries of immediate kin. But I am a Texan, and as every good Texan knows there is a grit here, a grit which anchors us to the very land. Before the internet, the telephone, the automobile, before the iron rails which connected east to west, the mail was an irregular thing. What takes the press of a button a

A good road starts out smooth and wide and narrows as you go, begins known but ends a stranger, is messy - wind in hair, dirt in air. It is a long, deep stretch, a song that never ends. There should be wildflowers, shades of yellow and violet, dangling and leaning into the breeze, sighing – waiting for a solitary traveler. There should be treasure, hidden behind locked gates, in secret culverts. An unplanned tire change along the way - a moment of hesitation. Doubt. A good ro

We camp at Ute Trailhead in the San Juan Mountains and in the morning, a white crystalline blanket covers the ground; my breath moves...

You do too much. You don't do enough. Don't drink, or don't drink too much. Dress this way. Act this way. Smile regardless. Ignore the...

The path is rocky and rooted in places, smooth and firm in others. The terrain a mixture of rolling ridges, rivers of talus slope, alpine...

I stood on the edge today… of a storm, a jagged chasm, a bridge, an open doorway. There are some who use words like weights, hefting them...

There is something about a river. She is not the calm soul of the pond with her springy cattails and lily pads, nor the vast moodiness of...

A maze of washes and draws and mountains and ridges and hills and swales and low points and canyons. A crescendo of building pressure,...

Everybody out here is escaping something, I said. Or running toward something, she replied. I am reminded of a poem from three years...

Death has been on my mind lately. This land is full of it, marked, unmarked. Animals, humans, plants. A land that once thrived – or as...

I followed a bear this morning, along a lush desert trail, past prickly pear in bloom, down a gravel wash with over-reaching roots, into...

In the morning, trying to catch the springs in solitude, I am the only one on this rocky, caliche road and as such can move freely –...

El Capitan, Guadalupe Mountains National Park Which do you like better, I was asked the other day,   riding or writing? Riding, I replied...

Weather in Big Bend is a work of art. The light-play on velvet, mountains stretched across a powder blue sky, only a thin rake of clouds to curtail the day and then nothing. The sun’s wake is splashed unhindered in every possible direction. Water - translucent, opaque, murky, stagnant, trickling, flooding. The lifeblood of the desert, sculptor of rock and earth, mover of stone and brush. The dictator of survival. Her calling card a vocal perfume of musk and dust and petrichor