A photographer's Journey Across the American West
There are trips you plan and trips that plan you. This one had been assembling itself quietly for years — in the margins of school calendars, in the gaps between youth football training schedules and parent-teacher evenings, in every conversation that began, "One day we should..." and ended, more often than not, in a sigh. We are parents of two boys, and parents of two boys do not simply pack a van and drive seven thousand miles across America. Not until the boys are old enough to be left to their own capable devices, anyway. Not until the window finally, improbably, opens.
The window opened in April 2026. We bought a Thor Tellaro — a compact but cleverly engineered camper van built on a Ram Promaster chassis — and began drawing lines on a map that stretched from North Andover, Massachusetts, all the way to the Colorado Rockies, Utah's canyon country, the Arizona desert, Wyoming's mountain valleys, and back again. The lines, when you added them up, came to roughly 7,500 miles. The plan: drive them over three weeks, sleep in the van, cook in the van, photograph everything.
We departed on the morning of April 4th, 2026. It was a grey New England morning, the kind that offers no ceremony, no dramatic send-off. But somewhere over the Atlantic — or perhaps over the Florida coast, depending on the trajectory — the crew of the Artemis programe was heading for the moon. We were heading for Colorado. Both journeys, it seemed to us, involved a great deal of distance, a certain amount of trust in engineering, and an unreasonable amount of optimism.
I am a photographer by passion and by instinct, the kind of person who stops the car at things that probably don't warrant stopping for, who has opinions about the quality of light at 4:30 in the afternoon, who travels with more camera bodies than changes of clothes. My wife has the patience of someone who has been married to that person for a long time, and the good grace not to mention it too often. Between us, we planned the route, drove the miles, cooked the meals, argued about where to empty the grey tanks, and stood together in front of things so beautiful they made conversation difficult.
This blog series is the record of that journey. It is not a guidebook, though it may accidentally function as one. It is not a listicle of the Ten Best Sunsets or Seven Must-See Viewpoints. It is a travel memoir — honest, occasionally self-deprecating, sometimes deeply moved — written by someone who believes that the act of making photographs is one of the most complete ways of paying attention to the world. Every chapter ends with a Photography Notes section: the gear, the light, the decisions made and unmade, the shots that worked and the ones that didn't. Because photography is not a passive act. It is an argument with reality, and the road gave us no shortage of material.
The American West is a place that defeats cliché simply by existing. You can know every photograph of Delicate Arch, every postcard shot of Monument Valley, every drone reel of the Grand Canyon, and still find yourself standing at the actual thing with your mouth slightly open and your compositional instincts temporarily offline. The landscape is older than anything your nervous system was built to process. You adjust, eventually. Or you don't. Both are fine.
This is what we wanted. All 7,500 miles of it.
TRIP AT A GLANCE
Departure : April 4th, 2026 — North Andover, Massachusetts
Return: Early May 2026
Total Distance : Approximately 7,500 miles
Duration : 1 month
Vehicle : 2023 Thor Tellaro (Ram Promaster 3500 chassis)
Overnight Style: Boon docking (Walmart, campgrounds, BLM land)
Destinations: Garden of the Gods · Great Sand Dunes NP · Arches NP · Canyonlands NP · Monument Valley · Grand Canyon South Rim · Antelope Canyon · Horseshoe Bend · Zion NP · Grand Tetons NP · Devils Tower · Mount Rushmore · Badlands NP
Planned but Skipped: Yellowstone NP (severe storm, week-long forecast)
Photography Equipment: Canon 5D Mk5 DSLR, wide-angle, telephoto & macro lenses, GoPro, drone, IPhone 17 pro, Starlink connectivity
Longest Single Day: 870 miles / 13hr 41 min
