May is a difficult month in the central Rocky Mountains. Even on a year such as this, where the prevailing winds elected to deny snow to those who love it (the intermountain West) and deliver it to those that hate it and have no use for it (Northern Michigan and New York City), inevitably there is a spring day where what remains of winter gets in your way. Today was that day. Mill Creek is one of the crown jewels of the Gunnison Valley. There are no bad views here, it is emi

Just before the county line, on Gold Basin Road, there is an unmarked turnoff tucked in the willows. Follow it up for a while and you will gain the ridge. After the cattle guard, the road descends in a wide arc, gradually making its way to the bottom of a surprisingly deep gully. Here, tucked between sage hills, the road follows the creek, making its way across a marshy meadow and a sometimes deep water crossing. Cell phone reception is spotty, the hillsides steep. As you c

Everyone close to me knows about this every-road-and-trail-on-a-map-under-my-own-power obsession of mine and, the majority of the time, I wander far and wide unimpeded. My friends encourage and laugh at me, my kids just shrug their shoulders, and everything about my job can wait. My husband long ago resigned himself to his wife’s long disappearances into the sage. The upshot for him, I believe, is that he generally gets to watch televised baseball without anyone saying, “OMG

The compulsion to complete every road and trail on a map is fairly arbitrary, as is the approximately forty by sixtyish mile quadrant of the rocky mountains my foldable map represents. The edges of the map are not administrative boundaries, not counties, not even mountain ranges, but simply where the map makers overlaid an imaginary rectangle on a section of earth. The farthest boundaries of my map bisect trails and highways. The bottom is fifteen or so miles of the top of th