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When you're rolling across the wide open desert of central Nevada in early January, alone doesn't begin to describe the feeling. It's all cracking fence posts and rusty barbed wire. The few man-made sites you do pass are all marked keep out, no trespassing, or Property of the United States Govt. My day had begun hours earlier camping near some hot springs miles outside of Mammoth Lakes, California. I had stayed there for a few days after repeated storms blanketed the area wit

Paradox is a place that seemed to invite those estranged from society. The West is wide open, and many who crossed it in the 19th century were leaving society behind, at least temporarily. But to be estranged from it is altogether different. Some of the people who came to the Paradox Valley had no place among civilized men and no use for their laws either. One of those men was Axel Peterson. In 1910 he arrived in Paradox, a hard-drinking drifter in his mid-thirties. He looked

Driving north through the narrow end of Lion Gulch, the red rock walls suddenly open to reveal a sweeping view of the “Slaughterhouse of the West.” This is Paradox, Colorado, a settlement named for the strange, paradoxical course of the Dolores River, which cuts across the valley rather than flowing along it. Unfortunately, the valleys past is not as paradoxical. Its a history marked by violence and lawlessness in the 19th century and into the 20th, like many across the west.

As I rolled down the highway, I was pointed towards "the door through which the world rushed into Montana," according to Lora Anderson-Gale. I'm talking about Bannack, the Montana ghost town that started it all. After resupplying in Dillon for the better part of the day, I booked it over Badger Pass through the white-dusted sagebrush that smattered the rolling hills surrounding me in early November. Bannack is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the state of Montana. Eac