Words and Light

This spring break will be one of friends, adventures, photography and the West.

Tonight, Jeff and I will board the Greyhound to meet Esten in Tulsa. From there, we’ll begin our epic roadtrip. You can check out our general route below:

The green markers are where we'll be staying overnight. The routes between the markers will certainly deviate from what's shown in this map, especially between points E and F.

So, what’s the point of this roadtrip?

TO TAKE PHOTOS.

Actually, this roadtrip was the brainchild of my friend Chelsea and me. I’ll put it this way: we were not happy with things in the East (that is, east of the Mississippi), and one night, I said, “Screw the East. Let’s just roadtrip West over spring break.”

That was in mid-October. Since then, we recruited Jeff to join us, Chelsea dropped out and Esten hopped in on the plan. Jeff, Esten and I happen to be pretty avid photographers — hell, we study photojournalism — so what was once a trip to escape the clutches of the Midwest and East has now become a prolonged photographic adventure. Each of us is armed with at least one DSLR and one film camera. (Knowing Esten, he probably has four or five film cameras in tow.)

We’re pretty damned excited. Here’s why I, for one, am pretty damned excited:

• I love roadtrips.
• I love photography.
• I love photo adventures.
• I love the West. It’s so damn romantic. Mountains, deserts, long roads, big starry skies — it’s majestic and real, and empty and full at the same time.
• I’ve spent the past five summers in the West, either as a participant or employee at Philmont Scout Ranch. Now, for the first time since 2001, I’m going East in the summertime, as I’ll be interning at washingtonpost.com. Call me sentimental, but I view this trip as my farewell to the West before my big adventure East.

Of course, you can expect to see photos. We should have Internet access twice on this trip, so I don’t plan on having any photos uploaded until we return to Columbia next Sunday. That also means that this blog will be a little empty for a while, as well as my Twitter. But there will definitely be plenty photos up in the coming weeks, depending on how quickly I can get the film developed and edit everything.

That said, I’m signing off this blog for a little while. Maybe I’ll have some brief updates when we do have the Internet those two times, but who knows? We’re on this trip to explore what regions of the West we can fit in a week, and having fun and taking photos are our prerogative.

P.S. Regarding the big photo above… no, I was not actually hitchhiking on the Taos gorge bridge. And no, the photo (taken by my good friend Stephen Bush last summer) will not represent actual activities to be attempted during this roadtrip. For serious. And the text comes from a song that only Philmont aficionados would know; it’s called “I Don’t Mind.”