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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

A few weeks ago, I found myself roaming the alpine forests of the La Sal Mountains on a job that promises remote unpredictability. I was out on a fire assignment, one of those long days in a four-wheel-drive engine, chasing wildfires racing across the landscapes of the American West. When the call came, I wasn’t thrilled about the timing. Some of my best friends were in town, and I had been savoring a rare stretch of time off amid a whirlwind summer of work. But the Deer Cree

Tucked away in one of the furthest reaches of the Yankee Fork, miles up an isolated gorge, lies the ghost town of Custer, Idaho. As I roll into town, the dense evergreens on either side give way to wide, open swaths of snow, dotted with aspen and willow trees. The town is quiet, with numerous structures boarded up for winter, their roofs blanketed in a thick layer of snow. Not another soul is in sight as I park the truck and step out to walk through this slice of history. At

With clear weather forecast for the next few days, I ventured deeper into the mountains toward the ghost towns of Custer and Bonanza. Following the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River north, I passed a tall cottonwood tree standing by the roadside. Its trunk, gnawed halfway through, must have been no match for the local beaver population. The notch was on the roadside and a few inches wide, suggesting that the tree would soon fall at some random moment. It almost felt as though t

In a matter of moments after beginning my descent, I realized how big that fissure in the earth really was, and it was evident why that p...

That morning my legs moved slowly, twisting and stretching a bit in recovery from trekking in the footsteps of countless others in that...

Out in the middle of the Mojave Desert lies an oasis most people never see, let alone hear about. With faded stucco buildings, peeling...

Standing above the haggard former mining outpost of Garnet, I felt like I was in the foreground of an old Charles Russell painting as the...

The Hiawatha Trail and the Milwaukee Road are both routes that amble through the wilderness of the St. Joe Mountains and include looming,...

I woke up that morning along Howard Lake, under the watchful eye of Elephant Peak and was greeted with a bit of fresh snow on top of an...