Road Fever

The great love affair of my life started before I met my husband.

I fell deeply and passionately in love with the open road, during an epic road trip six years ago. Since that journey, I've driven nearly 200,000 miles back and forth across America. I've driven through every state except Alaska, visited 70 national parks and monuments, and taken tens of thousands of photographs. It’s nowhere near enough.

Road trips are never about the destination, of course; they’re about the drive. The more trips I take, the more I seek out the empty highways, the ones unspoiled by traffic or civilization. I spent a decade in New York City and the vast majority of my adult life in one metropolis or another. These days, I want to get away from cities, to drive through a place where I can see the Milky Way at night and the entire horizon at dawn.

Of all the highways I’ve driven, the one I liked best was a cracked two-lane country road running down the middle of Montana. Highway 89 runs from the east side of Glacier National Park, through Great Falls and a national forest, all the way to the gates of Yellowstone National Park on the Wyoming border. Between Glacier and Great Falls, it’s two lanes of nothing—no billboards, no gas stations or truck stops, very few houses, only a handful of tiny towns. Best of all, there’s no traffic. Just a long, straight, empty stretch of highway, in the middle of some of the most gorgeous scenery in America—the Rocky Mountains on one side, the long slope of the High Plains on the other.

I won’t advocate speeding (though I did, excessively) or rolling down your windows to sing along loudly and off-key to some road-trip-appropriate music (I did that, too, much to the amusement of many cows). I will recommend driving it on a clear, warm day, stopping often to take pictures. Bring a picnic lunch, as well. If you’re lucky, you’ll see an elk or two.

The last hour or so of 89 is the approach to Yellowstone National Park. If you save this for the end of the day, you can see the setting sun against the jagged Absaroka mountain range, and realize how accurate the phrase “purple mountains’ majesty” is. You may be tempted to stay, to never go home. That’s okay—on every trip, I’m always tempted. That’s the glory of the empty road. It just keeps going.