“Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty.

“Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty... Adventure seems to beset me on all quarters without my even searching for it... Though not all my days are as wild as this, each one holds its surprises, and I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.” – Everett Reuss
Off The Road Again
California's Anza Borrego State Park is a maze of unpredictable dirt roads, so many spots will remain relatively untrampelled, if not totally secret. I was dying to reach this spot just outside the park for sunset or sunrise, but it took me four tries and routes over the course of two days to actually reach it, even with high clearance and 4WD! The first route was a dirt road named Something-or-other Trail, and that turned into a increasingly decaying dirt bike trail that I decided to bail out from and drive back out of. The second route I tried turned into those deep, close bumps which trail bikes make, and after a mile or two of those, again I gave up that particular approach. The third option looked really promising, involving driving miles up a primitive road placed in a dry riverbed. Surely that was the most major access road, if not the closest. What could go wrong? After driving tens of miles to reach that downhill end of the drainage, I arrived to find deep mud. It would be days or weeks before it would dry out enough to be passable. So now more than a day after I had started, I looked on the maze of roads on the map and plotted a complicated course through higher, drier ground, without using any of the trails I had already eliminated. It was interesting in deep gravel, sand and winding through mud hills, but I made it with only one minor ding on a rock that was apparently just a little higher than my SUV's 8" clearance. This site isn't pristine. There were dozens of folks there on trail bikes and ATVs, but they left to head back to their camps just as a few clouds on the horizon caught a bit of sunset light, their fire-breathing machines making buzzing noises like a swarm of giant killer bees. There's a fence around the site which shows up in most compositions; some people choose to edit it out.


I just can't wait to get off the road again
The life I love is making pictures with my friends
And I can't wait to get off the road again
(Paraphrasing, but not actually quoting, Willie Nelson)