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America Was Beautiful
A celebration of road trips through America’s endangered Western landscapes
From America’s Western highways, you experience an impossibly vast landscape filled with optimism and looming tragedy. When you get out of the car at a rest stop or roadside trucker-traveler plaza and shift your gaze away from the gas pumps and towards the horizon, you feel the call to adventure.
When you drive windy backroads in the Sierra Nevadas or cruise along the interminable, straight rural highways of Barstow, California, Southeast Idaho, or hundreds of other Great Basin locales, you understand how Kerouac could come out West and end up writing On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
One of the things that once made this continent-sized country great was a patchwork of public lands managed by national, state, and municipal agencies for us. There’s a reason Woodie Guthrie’s song, This Land is Your Land, lost its edge and became canonized as an American patriotic standard. We the people enjoyed scenic views vouchsafed from greedy corporate interests who only see unharvested profits in the wilderness.
