Nostalgia

American west

Quarantine sucked. 

I may be a broken record for saying that, but it did. I live to travel. I quickly realized after months of stagnation that I was not made to stay in one place for long. And so, when my close friend asked me if I wanted to take a road trip up the Pacific Coast to Vancouver in June, I jumped on the opportunity and said yes. It was March, after all; the pandemic would be over by then, right?

We were wrong. Still, we felt that as long as we camped the entire way and got tested, we would be safe. And so I felt giddy in the final weeks before the trip, feeling exhilarated with the anticipation of finally leaving when my friendship with the person I was supposed to go with, my best friend, broke down. No more trip. And quarantine sucked again. 

I was lost after this incident. My mental health was suffering before the trip was cancelled, and now, I was stuck. I sank into a depression that lasted several days, and in that haze, I had a dream that I went to Colorado. Like literally, I just had a dream, where I was in Colorado. And I clamped onto that dream, hard. 

The next morning I woke up with a half-witted urge to just drive there. I had nothing better to do after all. And so, peering out of my depressive haze into a land of mountains and endless trees, I began to plan. I’m good at planning. Before I embark on any trip, I usually make an extensive schedule with every aching detail of my journey. This one was eleven pages long. A ten day trip through five national parks that would save me from the hole I was in. 

Four days later, I left. It was the fifth of July, and I had never gone camping alone before. Hell, I’d barely gone camping, period. But somehow that didn’t matter to a newly confident, post-friendship-breakdown Niko. I’ll figure it out, I said. 

And I did, kind of. 

My first stop was a friend’s house on Lake Mohave in Arizona. And then the Grand Canyon, where upon arriving, I shattered my phone screen and spent four lengthy hours getting it fixed in Flagstaff. I never made it into the canyon, but I did catch a glimpse of sunset over the South Rim, where I got the feeling I always crave while traveling. That fiery glow in your heart that makes you feel more alive in that moment than any time you can remember. I was there, I was present, and I was happy. 

After the Grand Canyon, I pretty much threw the itinerary out the window. I realized it was much faster for me to go straight to Colorado than to wind up through Utah and Idaho and back down through Wyoming like I’d previously planned. So I left the next morning—day three of my journey—for a place I’d never even heard of before that day: Mesa Verde National Park.

One thing I realized while driving the long drag through Eastern Arizona: there’s a reason people don’t like driving the long drag through Eastern Arizona. People told me to avoid the route if I could help it, but it was the fastest way to Colorado and I wanted enough time to explore Mesa Verde before sundown. 

For hours I drove through red painted desert in the Navajo Nation, passing signs that slowly transitioned from English to Navajo. The land was dry and cracked. The roadside markets, once filled with people selling traditional Navajo and Hopi wares, were empty. COVID-19 had taken a heavy toll on this place, and it was a sad scene to witness as I drove across the unforgiving landscape. 

At last, I made it to the border. On arrival I found an oasis; an enormous green megalith rising from the desert. The Pueblo Indians farmed the top of this mesa for hundreds of years before leaving in 1300 for reasons unknown. What’s left is a scattered collection of ancient cities and houses carved into the cliff faces and set among verdant forest and scrubland. 

I left Mesa Verde very glad I’d decided to stop there, and moved on to camp in the Rocky Mountains outside of Aspen. From Aspen, I crossed the Top of the Rockies, a breathtaking lookout point at 11,000 feet, and headed down the mountain to Colorado’s Eastern Plain and into Fort Collins, where I stayed with a friend before haphazardly deciding to foray into South Dakota. 

The Dakotas had always captivated me. I didn’t quite know what to expect, given that growing up I was fed the same story most SoCal kids probably heard: that the Dakotas were a vast, empty landscape full of farms and not much else. 

The wildlife enthusiast in me knew this wasn’t true. And yet, driving to Wind Cave National Park, I became worried. There were a lot of farms, and not much else. I had extended my trip by two days to be able to come here. Was I wasting my time? 

Luckily, the scenery began to change, featureless pastures giving way to rolling hills dotted with trees and wildflowers. I had reached the Black Hills, a huge ecosystem covering much of the Western Dakotas, and the ancestral home of the Lakota Sioux. I reached my campsite in the late morning and set out to explore the colossal plains before me. 

Wind Cave National Park is most famous for its “boxwork” cave formations, however, the cave was closed due to the pandemic. Instead, I found myself exploring what was above the ground--a beautiful patchwork of wooded plains and grassy mounds that stretched for miles  in every direction. Roosevelt once famously said of the Dakotas “It was here that the romance of my life began,” and it’s easy to see why. The chirping calls of prairie dogs filled every valley and meadow, and at one point my car was entirely surrounded by a great herd of bison. The land was rich in life, and for me, it was paradise. 

It was a sad thing to leave Wind Cave at sunrise the next morning, but the tiresome haul to Yellowstone across the entirety of Wyoming awaited me. Finally, after seven hours of driving, I came to my campsite in Buffalo Bill State Park. 

It was here that the abandonment of my Master Plan came back to bite me. Because I’d decided to take an entirely different route the day I left the Grand Canyon, every campsite I’d reserved was useless, and so I was mostly boondocking—camping on public land in unestablished sites. Turns out, you can’t do that in or near Yellowstone unless you have a hard-sided shelter, like an RV, because there are grizzlies. 

This was unfortunate for me. I arrived at the established campsite that I’d found last-minute to avoid the grizzlies and realized it was little more than 100 degree asphalt in what felt like the windiest damn valley in all of Wyoming. I couldn’t put up a tent here, and I was losing daylight. After a few frantic calls to my mother, I finally found a cheap motel where I could stay the night in Laurel, Montana. Two hours away from where I was, and one hour further from the park than my original site. Fantastic.

Still, though, it was better than what was essentially a sunbaked, gusty parking lot. With that in mind I checked into the dusty, albeit incredibly cute, Locomotive Inn and settled in for the night. The wildlife of Yellowstone awaited me, and I had big plans to wake up before sunrise and try to arrive as early as possible. 

In typical Niko fashion, that did not happen. My alarm was somehow set to silent mode, and I woke up in a panic at 6:30 AM, distraught that I had missed sunrise but determined to make it to the park in record time. 

That, too, did not happen. I’m not a religious person, but if I ever had a reckoning with God, this day was it. Two hours I needed to drive through the Beartooth Pass (which I later learned is one of the most dangerous roads in America), and then I would be there. Tired and in a hurry, I brushed off the fact that my gas tank was precariously low. Oh well, I thought. There’s got to be a gas station somewhere along the way, right?

I was wrong. 

Up the mountain I went, past gorgeous valleys and breathtaking vistas, when it started to rain. Then, it got cold. Really cold. Like, 27 degrees cold. Like, road-is-freezing-over-and- I’m-driving-a-Prius cold. And then came that lonely, wretched beeping of my trusty stallion telling me she was nearly empty. And I was driving up a mountain, on frozen roads, with nobody around. 

I was scared. I prayed, which I rarely do. What else do you do when you’re faced with an impossible situation of your own making, that could end in your death? I crept up the mountain, vocally urging my Prius to just please make it over the next ridge when finally, finally, the road turned downward, and I could see a cluster of houses and a gas station at the bottom. I’d reached nearly 11,000 feet of elevation, surrounded by a beautiful winter wonderland, and all I could do was watch as my car slowly rolled down the mountain. But I made it. 

Terrifying brush with death aside, my day in Yellowstone was incredible. I hiked in the Lamar River Valley and came across a mother grizzly and her cubs fighting with a pack of wolves over an elk carcass. I spent so long enjoying the wildlife that I ran out of time to even see Old Faithful, but I didn’t mind. I was ecstatic. I moved through the park quickly, trying to soak in as much as possible before leaving in the afternoon. 

For once, I actually had a reserved campsite in my next destination: Idaho Falls, Idaho, just outside the West entrance of Yellowstone. I honestly didn’t expect much from Idaho. From what I’d heard, it was mostly just miles of corn with the occasional mormon church sprouting from the fields. And at first, I was right. My campsite was quite literally in the middle of vast acres of cornfields. I’d booked a tent site at a lovely little commune owned by the Aspen Grove Inn on the Snake River, and upon arriving was greeted by a lively woman named Sharon who showed me around. 

The Snake River is magical. I’ve always felt a strong affinity for rivers. Dipping my hand into the Snake, I felt at once connected to every piece of land it touched. Edward Abbey said “If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert,” and indeed, I felt connected by the soul of the land around me. I must have sat by the water’s edge for several hours, watching her carve her way across the endless Idaho plain. It may have been flat and full of corn, but something about this place made me feel incredibly alive.

It was in this moment that I came to realize what I’d just accomplished. I was on my 3500th mile across the US, alone, surviving everything that went wrong and right. My problems were so far away from me I could barely imagine them, and I felt at once both incredibly proud and terrified of what I had to return to. Did I have to return? Home felt so foreign. I wept into the river, the first real tears I’d shed in so long. A part of me remitted to the land, but I wished I could leave more. I wished I could stay there forever. 

The night came fast, and so did the bugs. My movie moment couldn’t last much longer, I was being attacked by hundreds of mosquitos. An ironically unromantic end to the day, but somehow fitting. My life would not be perfect when I returned. Travel can’t cure depression (trust me, I’ve tried so many times). The past two weeks had felt like a superhero movie. I overcame everything. I did what nobody I knew had done. But in the end, the person I got to be on that trip was not real, much as I may have wanted him to be. 

I’d hoped not to leave this story off on a sad note, and I’m not sure that this is. After all, the memories of that adventure still burn bright in my mind. They remind me that I’m capable of so much, even when every day tasks feel impossible. The person I was on that trip may not be entirely real, but I carry parts of him now. I may be the first person ever to say “I found myself in Idaho,” but screw it. I found myself in Idaho, parts I didn’t know existed but love to this day, and that’s enough for me. 

Words and Photo: Niko Frost