United States– category –

Some wonderful camping in one of my favorite mountain ranges proved the end cap for a 15-month adventure as Shiz, Fin, & I finally reached Seattle and home.  We had lined up an extremely nice, three week house sit for a pair of very ...

We took the beauty and scale of the beach with us as we headed back into the mountains to go camping with my dad and some friends.  I deeply love the Cascades; the North Cascades are easily one of my favorite places to camp and hike.  As...

After the site of the most famous eruption in Washington State history, we still had a couple of days before our house sit and needed to figure out how to spend it.  We still weren't sure if we were going to camp in the Cascades or head ...

The outdoor adventures of Bend in our minds, we went camping with our friends, stayed with them for a night in Portland, and then crossed back into Washington at long last. In the seven years that we lived in Seattle together, we never o...

Bend was thankfully far enough from the fires to let us escape the haze, but the fires brought us into the area a couple of days earlier than we planned, so we had some time to check out the nature that Bend is so renowned for. Newberry ...

Our minds blown like so many shards of obsidian, we crossed into Oregon, just one state away from home.  The first stop on the list: Crater Lake, where my mother took me as a child. The fires tearing through California and Oregon were wr...

We walked through the remnant tubes magma and onto something that sounded vaguely interesting, glass mountain.  Apparently there were lots of obsidian lying around and people were pretty free to walk around.  California actually has two ...

Now that we better understood some of the active volcanoes in the area, we went to see what some of their predecessors had done by exploring a couple of the caves in Lava Beds.  There are so many caves that it would probably take 3 days ...

The USA's second deepest lake behind us, we began our trek North, researching places as we went.  One place that happened to be on our route and seemed interesting enough was Lassen.  It sounded interesting enough, but not awe-inspiring,...

After our brief stint jumping over an in-land border, we crossed another line, from Nevada into California so that we could pivot North at Lake Tahoe. Known for tourism in all seasons, this massive lake feeds draws countless visitors in ...

Nevada primarily traversed, we finally made it to the border of California, with a stop in Reno.  Unsurprisingly, the cheapest hotel there was a casino, so we just stopped for the night, wandered the casino for 10 minutes, then stayed in...

We drove out of a unique, special world and onto highways, which would be our home for the next two days.  Though our image of Nevada essentially consisted of desert, looking at the map and talking to people as we stopped, there's so muc...

After Thor's fireworks and Hispanic pastries, it was time to hustle West, through Nevada, and start the drive North to Seattle.  We weren't quite done with Utah, however, as we had to make a quick stop at the border with Nevada for the s...

Though we saw many more, the bizarre hoodoos of the oil fields proved to be our goodbye to the majestic rocks of the Southwest.  We did stop for camping on the way West, but nothing as intimate of post-worthy as what we had experienced o...

Blown away by the rock wall of dinos, we headed back into Utah to see a place that Shiz marked on the map a long time ago, Fantasy Canyon.  Neither of us could really remember much about the place, save that when Shiz was doing research ...

Water played to focal point of our last stop, but this time rock was our theme.  Specifically, thousands upon thousands of dinosaur fossils that formed when an ancient river bed flooded after some sort of disaster, trapping a treasure tr...

Having explored a lesser known but glorious canyon, we set the front bumper towards the Northwest corner of Colorado for a later exit into Utah.  With all the volcanic activity around us and the numerous days we spent camping, however, w...

We hesitantly left a town we'd easily call home to start our trek back West across Utah, Nevada, and California, cutting through central Colorado South of I-70.  The Rockies are simply gorgeous, but during the summer, like many forests i...

A slice of regional history behind us, we drove into Boulder for a week of relaxing and laundry with a pet sitting gig we had arranged.  We drove right next to the Rockies the whole time, with gorgeous mountains to the left and the expan...

After one man's private enterprise and work of passion, we camped in the mountains South outside of Colorado Springs for a night before heading up towards Denver.  On our way down from the mountains we passed another private enterprise, ...