I’ve been so inflamed that I didn’t even tell you that there was a trip last weekend. A quite sacred one.

This was the spiritual pinnacle. Far away and high up in the true painted desert.

From the right of the frame, a massive miles-long escarpment of naked reddish rock tapers down to nothing in a high valley. On the left, just ever so slightly higher on another range, the trees begin. The ridge keeps rising out of sight and the genievre become pines and thicken.

The in-between is the dwelling of the one true goddess and i feel that literally. Not think it.

The peaks dominate our views from Prettytown. But leaving town in this direction, we noticed that there were some nearly impressive volcanic uplifts that hide behind them and trail off surreptitiously to the northeast, near the Sunset Crater. Returning to the vicinity after the explorations gave another opportunity to study them, and in fact I altered my homeward bound route to get an even better look at the overall pattern of the highest parts of the lava field. This is it. That last little bit of it brushes 9000 feet of elevation and is nevertheless functionally invisible to most of the world.

After drinking in the last of the long pattern views I turned my face to the grim brown reality of the east. Which consisted of an utterly and completely empty dirt road that held teeth-rattling washboard at three miles an hour, and all the skinny horses, instead of any other cars. There may or may not have been a restriction on rez roads in place, or else it was just a very early Tuesday morning in a place no one would have any motivating reason to be, at all, save the one that I am.

May there always be such waste places so long as I draw breath. After that, I don’t care. Lack of solitude will be the least of the survivor’s problems.

At the end of the washboard, here, I reclaimed the pavement at the abrupt ending or beginning of the state route. It is ceremonially marked with a cattle guard as is the local custom.

I thought of Edward Abbey much, up along the Utah line in his native element. This is how Alex spills Abbeyesque. It’s not as marketable but it’s got a juicy heart, in my own self-assessing estimation. Let us pray.