If one single state, one single park, one single trail or one single place drove this entire trip, it would be the Delicate Arch Trail at Arches National Park in southeastern Utah. For years and years (and years) I had wanted to see this single place but always found reasons not to go. Moab isn't in the most conveniently located place (a long drive from Denver and an even longer drive from Salt Lake City or Las Vegas) and grueling summer temperatures make the supposedly long, difficult walk to the arch even more difficult. Like most things it always seemed easier not to go than to go. Over and over (and over) again I'd wait just a little longer and decide instead do it next fall, next spring or the year after that, or the year after that.

All that changed (at least with respect to Moab) last year in Alaska (WARNING- generally pointless, unrelated story about to start). When I first picked up my unlucky rental car that midnight in Anchorage I came to realize that its radio had no direct iPod cable connection and that local radio was, well, sadly unlistenable. On my way out of town on the long road to Homer I decided to stop at the city's only mall to find a local record store, realizing that a reasonably good CD or two might make the long road feel somehow less long. After finding no local CD/record store I settled on Alaska's only Best Buy and picked up three CDs including an older one from Bright Eyes (one of my favorite bands) called Lifted. As I listened (and listened) to the CD I started to obsess on a few songs including one called "Make War" whose first line is "our love is dead but without limit, like the surface of the moon, or the land between here and the mountain," with a real emphasis on the word "here." As I sang along over (and over) again it started to remind me of the desert and (for whatever reason) the idea of Delicate Arch, an image I had only seen in books, on the National Geographic Channel and on those damn Utah license plates that seemed to always mock me for not yet bothering to see it in person. I had also waited a long time to visit Alaska, maybe ten years, maybe even more, always thinking about going but then always deciding against it for all the same reasons. In many ways this trip across the American southwest is similar, I had been thinking about both trips for a long time, both cover many places I had never really been and both were not necessarily easy. So last year, after driving hundreds and hundreds of miles in Alaska, somewhere on the George Parks Highway, somewhere near the untaken road to Talkeetna, I distinctly remember hearing that song again and deciding once and for all that this spring things would change, that I had waited long enough and would finally make driving thousands and thousands of miles across the desert to get my ass to Delicate Arch a priority. Of course other plans interfered and turned spring into summer, but at least I still managed to make it this year.