This is where my “There will be no miracles here” shot comes from, which is apparently what a french king told a village that became overrun with miracles and threatened his authority. I think it especially interesting at a golf course where more than once a prayer for a miracle has been whispered. Ha! Nathan Coley, you are one of my new favorites.

Of course, there are the usual suspects in the mix and what not but with Fashion Week upon us, there should be some new characters in the mix shortly.

What we discovered was a ghost town whose residents probably vanished with the futile quest for gold. Boarded up buildings and abandoned railroad equipment served as eery testaments to a time that came and went. I later learned from a local bartender that people still pan for gold in this canyon. While most people left town and moved on, some continue to chase the dreams of the pioneers.

A boarded up, abandoned home scares away curious visitors with broken glass, trash, and a dilapidated draw bridge.

For dinner, we headed to Nederland about five miles away which represents an altogether different era. Art galleries, funky boutiques, rock shops, a cannabis club, and a co-op grocery store line the streets, making up a liberal enclave Kevin thinks sprouted during the sixties. The town boasts some interesting history like being the recording destination for the likes of The String Cheese Incident and hosting a spring festival “Frozen Dead Guy Days” that celebrates a cryogenically frozen Norwegian man “Grandpa Bredo” who’s been sheltered in a shed in the hills for decades.

After a satisfying Indian dinner and a perfect cup of milk chai at Kathmandu Restaurant, we hunkered down in the lakefront cabin until dawn.

After exploring the train tracks and Rollinsville, we enjoyed a satisfying Indian meal at Kathmandu Restaurant in Nederland.

We arrived at Rocky Mountain National Park just after sunrise when the valleys were still resting beneath the shade of mountain peaks and the meadows sparkled with frost. Low hanging clouds seeped over the Continental Divide as marmot waddled across the roads and moose made their way through swampy fields.

Our early start allowed us to drive clear across Colorado to Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area on the Utah-Wyoming border, where we camped right near the rim of a beautiful red rock canyon that outlines a large reservoir. The site is near Dinosaur National Monument and has its own share of dinosaur and marine fossils. The scenery was incredible yet there wasn’t another camper in sight. Two rangers at the visitor center told us that most people from Utah don’t even know the place exists. Kevin and I only learned about it after spotting the large body of water on a map the day before and then looking it up on his iPhone and finding some enticing pictures. While I’m usually against depending on technology while traveling, I must admit that access to sites like Yelp have helped us add spontaneity to our travels; we can learn about places on the go and divert our path at any time.

We jumped on the chance to say hello to Utah again before a long journey north.

There's nothing like a sun lit gorge after a long day in the car. Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, Utah. Photo: Kevin Schnepel

“Western Wandering” is an ongoing travel series by Serena Renner on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from her Western U.S. road trip in August and September of 2010. See her first installment Utah’s Color Country here.

It pays to seek out the interesting folks you can find on the road. Pulling into the small town of Whitehall, Montana, I spied a bicycle weighed down with cross-country packs, resting outside the town’s cafe. Liz and I decided to stop for lunch and ordered a couple burgers from a harried waitress while absorbing the stares of tables full of locals. We found our seats, and I panned the room for the owner of the bike.

I found a tanned woman with gray hair, wearing spandex. I walked over and asked if she’d like to sit with us, and she courteously accepted. Through our conversation I found out she was on the tail end of a solo trip from Virginia to Idaho. Her name was Jan, and she had more adventure stories than would fit into one lunch. For one, if I remember right, she had ridden a train through Mongolia while pregnant. After finishing her burger and tall chocolate milkshake she gave me her card, which had a link to her blog.

Before she left, Jan also mentioned visiting nearby Lewis and Clark Caverns, which we had completely overlooked while planning our trip. The state park was only a few miles away. It was lucky that we ran into Jan, because otherwise we wouldn’t have backtracked and spent the afternoon crawling through stalagmites hundreds of feet under Montana.

Touring the West – Lewis and Clark Caverns – Images by Will Parson

Tecate Bukkake from Goddamn Cobras Collective on Vimeo.

My other collective, The Goddamn Cobras, are releasing new material left and right (and check out that beaut of a site!). I didn’t do much on this video, besides come up with the idea and take photos. The filming and editing were completely out of my hands but I still fancy the video and my description of it on Freewilliamsburg: “A gender studies graduate student could definitely write a dissertation about the possibility of feminine empowerment via a typically male dominated substance as demonstrated in this video.” Village Voice liked my description too!

We ended up submitting it to the Vimeo Awards in their captured division and find out sometime next month if getting tecate bukkaked gets you awards as well as notoriety.

Don’t go to Yellowstone. At least, don’t go in July. This year the park set a new July record for visitors with close to a million. I think any more weight from so many tourists might force the Yellowstone caldera down into the magma that powers all those geysers. In any case they’re already getting into all sorts of accidents.

Those million visitors drove over 320,000 cars through Yellowstone’s five entrances. The next time I visit, I think I will go in Spring when much of the park is open to bicycles but not cars.

Touring the West – Yellowstone National Park – Images by Will Parson

Highway 24 in Utah on the way to Capitol Reef National Park. Photos by Will Parson.

Between Cedar Breaks and Capitol Reef National Park stretches the red open road of Utah. My girlfriend Liz and I skipped famously scenic Highway 12, which Serena ended up taking on her own way through Utah. Instead we took the somewhat scenic Highway 24 instead.

Capitol Reef is like a mini Zion. Not as tall, not as wide, but also fewer people to muck up the scenery. Though, we still caught a boy vandalizing a rock while his family admired the sunset at aptly-named Sunset Point.

Several of the original buildings of the Mormon settlement town of Fruita are preserved, as are the orchards of apricot and pear trees. Visitors are free to pick their own fruit, and during my stay I harvested some of the tastiest apricots I’ve ever had.

Capitol Reef National Park is home to the former Mormon settlement town of Fruita, Utah.

Enjoy these photos of Capitol Reef while I prepare to serve up some photos from Yellowstone National Park, coming at you soon enough.

Touring the West – Capitol Reef National Park – Images by Will Parson

“Touring the West” is an ongoing travel series by Will Parson on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from his three weeks on the road in July. Find previous installments below.

• Part one – San Diego to Zion National Park
• Part two – Zion National Park
• Part three – Angel’s Landing
• Part four – Cedar Breaks National Monument

It looks like Will and I had similar ambitions for the summer: to breathe some fresh air, rediscover open space, and set out on a wind-blowing-through-our-hair car adventure to explore our own Western United States. My summer began with a mini road trip from Santa Barbara to Denver and will resume next week with an excursion through Yellowstone, Glacier and Banff National Parks before touring the Pacific Northwest.

My boyfriend, Kevin, and I did a quick road trip from Denver to Oakland a few months back and decided to take a different route this time through Utah’s color country. Like Will, we had our eyes set on Zion National Park and Hwy 12, which runs through Bryce Canyon National Park and The Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument–1.7 million acres of multicolored cliffs, buttes, and canyons shaped by eons of sedimentation, uplift and erosion. In attempt to see the national parks before they’re overrun with mostly foreign tourists, Kevin and I got up before sunrise every morning and visited either very early or later in the evening when they are most pristine. About an hour outside of Zion, we camped for free at the Kolob Reservoir right near the water’s edge, and on our second night, we stayed at Kodochrome Basin State Park near Tropic, which greeted us with an incredible sunset featuring unique pinnacles that rose abruptly out of the earth. On our way back to the I-70 on day 3, we did a quick drive through Capital Reef National Park (most of which was closed on our visit) and a detour to Goblin Valley State Park off Hwy 24.

I was most inspired by the region’s amazing color contrasts. Red-and-white-striped canyons stood out against the vibrant green vegetation that grew in their folds. Charcoal roads cut through butter yellow meadows and each sunrise and sunset outdid the last. Here is a glimpse of what I saw.

“Western Wandering” is an ongoing travel series by Serena Renner on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from her Western U.S. road trip in August and September, 2010.

When it’s 100 degrees in most of Utah you might do well to make the steep drive to Cedar Breaks National Monument just for the cool mountain air. The heat at Zion National Park in the middle of July makes it worth struggling up a windy road through Dixie National Forest to reach Cedar Breaks at an elevation of 10,000 feet. I welcomed the change in scenery — Cedar Breaks was crisp and more peaceful than heavily-populated Zion.

There were only a couple cars in the parking lot the morning we left Zion and reached Cedar Breaks. Liz and I were passing by on the way from Zion to Capitol Reef, but were enticed to join a wildflower tour guided by a young National Park Service ranger named Russ. Russ admitted he wasn’t an expert on flowers, but we were more than happy with his extensive knowledge of the area’s natural history.

Cedar Breaks is an interesting sight (just look it through the Google satellite). The 1500-year-old Bristlecone Pine trees tumble into the slowly eroding limestone breaks at a pace measured in centuries. These Bristlecones are just middle-aged compared to the 4,000-year-old specimens in California’s White Mountains, but at least anyone can approach the trees at Cedar Breaks and feel their stubby needles.

A Bristlecone Pine attracts a butterfly at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah.

Passing the Bristlecones prompted a discussion with Ranger Russ about ancient trees. Though individual Bristlecones can live to 5,000 years, clonal species like Aspen and Spruce can live much longer. Cedar Breaks is home to Quaking Aspen, which is the same species as a grove in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest that is at least 80,000 years old. Actually, that Aspen grove, known as Pando, may be as much as a million years old. And, at 6,615 pounds, Pando is the largest living organism on the planet.

If you’re into old trees and photography you’ll love The Oldest Living Things in the World project by artist/photographer Rachel Sussman. She goes around the world with biologists and documents organisms of all kinds that are at least 2,000 years old. I tried to find footage of Sussman’s recent TED talk (coincidentally held the same week I visited Cedar Breaks). Here is her website.

“Touring the West” is an ongoing travel series by Will Parson on MeridianCollective.org that will feature photos, text and video from his three weeks on the road in July. Find previous installments below.

• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

Many visitors to Zion National Park undertake the vertigo-inducing hike to the peak of Angel’s Landing despite it being one of the more grueling trails. It takes most people five hours to complete the five mile journey to the top of Angel’s Landing and back. I did it in half that and still took a bit of video now and then, admittedly while sucking in much-needed oxygen.

I stopped at Weeping Wall on the way back toward camp, and continued on to the town of Springdale, a tourist haven full of ice cream cones and souvenir minerals. The hotels and lodges in Springdale seemed to be doing brisk business, but for me sunset meant back to my tent.

In case you haven’t noticed, touring the West is an ongoing series. It’s been almost a week since my last installment, but posts should be more frequent from here on. One thing that’s for sure is I won’t be doing a “one day to one post” ratio for the three weeks of material. I can’t imagine anyone wants to see that much of my summer vacation.

Here’s Day 1 and Day 2 of Touring the West.

And here’s a video I made of Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park.

Touring the West – Angel’s Landing from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Will has been a bit busy with his trip recap to look over my photos. So, tired of his heavy-handed editing anyway, I decided to do a review of my own photos. Over the past two months, I have been to Philly, Puerto Rico, Michigan, Chicago and spent days on trains and boats. I biked miles and drove even more. I went to a music festival and took a trapeze class and learned to sail.

The good times and plenitude of novel experiences helped inspire some interesting shots. The two main characters ended up being Luke Miller (as per usual) and Wu-tang, who, I must say, are immensely entertaining. With my newly freed up schedule, I expect more fruitful months as June and July turned out to be.