Five years ago now, I received an email that began thusly. Needless to say, I was intrigued.
I just wanted to drop a quick line to say howdy. I only recently stumbled across your site and felt a bit of deja vu. I'm a photographer and I've spent the last 3-4yrs exploring the western side of North America in my 1998 Taco (with 400k miles on her!) and have been to a lot of the same amazing places you have. Luckily, you've been to a lot of places I haven't as well and given me some great inspiration. It seems we have a similar passion for finding out of the way places and interesting historic & pre-historic sites.
Death Valley has become something of an obsession for me. I've spent 2-3mo there each of the last 3 winters and we almost certainly must have crossed paths at some point. lol. I've driven most of its legal roads and done over 60 hikes and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface there. I had thought I'd found most of the best petroglyphs in the park, but your website actually turned me on to the fertility/condor canyon. It's great to know there's still more out there to discover. And (unless you're holding certain locations back from your website) there's several stunning places in DV that you guys have yet to discover. Haha. Give me a shout if you'd like a few hints.
Since then, ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ and I have sporadically traded emails, sharing an amazing place one of us had found, fishing for hints to a place that we hadn't, and laughing as we repeatedly missed each other in similar locations by mere hours.
Now, finally, we've gotten our acts together - just enough, which is asking a lot - for a meet up in our favorite National Park. The plan - to the extent we have one - is to wander our way from Eureka to Saline Valley, climbing into the Saline Range in search of the unknown.
I wonder what it'll be like to meet myself, and hear stories of all the places I've gone, but just a little bit different.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, this trip is coming soon...Consider subscribing to be notified when it's here!