Mile 0: Piegan Port of Entry, Montana
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection building’s blue metal roof shimmers in the midmorning sun. A few hundred yards north, across the 49th parallel, a smaller Canadian Border Services Agency station flies the maple leaf. Here, where Canada meets the United States and the Great Plains meet the Rockies—that purple wall rising to the west—is where U.S. Highway 89 begins.
There are more-mythic American roads than Highway 89. It doesn’t have the Ken Burns PBS patina of Route 66, with its echoes of Tom Joad and that ineffably cool Nat King Cole song. It doesn’t have the earth mother curves of California’s Highway 1 at Big Sur. Or the big-rig swagger of the Mad-Max-with-In-N-Out-Burger vehicular dystopia that is Interstate 5.
But. If you want one road that gives you the American West in all its beauty and mystery, this is it. Starting here at the border, U.S. 89 rolls nearly 1,400 miles south through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, through national parks, through Blackfeet and Navajo country, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, stunning and surprising at every turn.
And me? I will spend the next two weeks driving U.S. 89 because I need a road trip, and specifically this one. I grew up along this road. The highway is braided into my earliest memories, so entwined that I can’t imagine my childhood without it. I have spent many of the years since then traveling the West and writing about it, and though I have seen many remarkable places, Highway 89 remains my prime meridian. I’ve been away too long. I’ve needed a trip down a highway that is familiar but strange, because my life has grown familiar but strange. I want what only the best road trips give you: velocity and transcendence.
Starting now.
Mile 19: Glacier National Park, Montana
“The National Park Highway,” Highway 89 was called, back when American highways had advertising slogans, like instant coffee or cigarettes. The branding has faded, but the geography remains.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Glacier is a fine national park: 1,583 square miles of peaks, lakes, bears, glaciers (for now, at least), and the soothing sense of being sheltered from the cranky outside world. I’ll be here for a couple of days—hiking, bighorn sheep–spotting, and navigating Going-to-the-Sun Road. At day’s end, I’ll be settling into the fir-pillared lobby of Glacier Park Lodge, convincing myself that nothing has changed since the park opened in 1910.
That feeling is illusory.
Let’s start with the glaciers. There were 80 of these glinting epaulets of ice when the park was born; now, with us cooking the planet, they number closer to 25 and are shrinking. Within the next half century, all could be gone. It’s like we borrowed a friend’s summer cabin and trashed it, leaving a note—Sorry we broke a few things on our way out.
Then there’s the foundational question of how Glacier—and all the West’s national parks—came into being. Who benefited from them and who did not. That is why, on my third morning at Glacier, I’m climbing into Alger Swingley’s Blackfeet Outfitters jeep.
Swingley is in his 60s, lean and rangy. An enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe, he leads hunting and fishing and educational trips on the reservation. “If you look at a map,” Swingley says, “the government took away all this incredible land.” Much of the eastern half of Glacier National Park was once Blackfeet territory, sold too cheaply and under duress. After the park was established, Blackfeet could no longer hunt on their land. When they were invited in, it was to entertain tourists, with summer tipi encampments staged on the lawn of Glacier Park Lodge. “It was really like a zoo exhibit,” says Swingley.
We head east into the reservation. It’s handsome, loping country, furrowed by rivers and creeks—the Cut Bank, the Two Medicine—and rumpled with low hills. It is not thriving. Glacier National Park draws around three million visitors a year, but not much of that tourist money flows to the Blackfeet. The reservation’s biggest town, Browning, dissolved its government in 2018; the surrounding county, Glacier, is among the poorest in Montana.
The gap between the expressed ideals of America’s national parks and their record of displacing the Native peoples who lived in them has stirred anger across the West. The National Park Service is attempting to make amends with signage, exhibits, and programs. These efforts, Swingley believes, are not nearly enough. “Hey,” he tells me, “we want a piece of this action.”
Swingley points out Heart Butte, large and hazy on the southern horizon. It is, he tells me, a significant place for Blackfeet creation stories. He shows me a piskun, or buffalo jump, a long ridge with a steep drop-off over which Blackfeet would drive buffalo for easy harvesting. “This is where we fed ourselves,” Swingley says. “It was our Albertsons.” Back at the lodge, Swingley tells me that for all their challenges, the Blackfeet are luckier than the many tribes pushed across the continent by white settlement. The tribe has lost much of its land, but not all. “With this country,” he says, “they couldn’t round us up. Blackfeet are still in our homeland.”
Mile 116: Choteau, Montana
In Choteau, summer light filters through cottonwood trees. On Main Avenue, the Old Trail Museum features restored pioneer cabins and a lawn party of painted concrete dinosaurs—perky blue Maiasaura, burnt orange Einiosaurus. West of town is famed Egg Mountain, whose fossil dinosaur nests proved that the creatures cared for their young. I admire a Utahraptor claw on exhibit, a 900-pound taxidermied grizzly bear, and, propped up in a glass case in a corner, Old Sol, billed as “the only skeleton in the world with Hudson Bay Company arrowheads embedded in its bones.”
Back on the road. Grassy perfume of alfalfa fields, with bales lined up round and tidy as tater tots. In an hour, Great Falls. “Rough-edged and upright and remote,” Richard Ford observed of the city, but it has attractions. Sitting on a bluff above the Missouri River, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center informs me that L. and C. declared the Missouri River waterfalls here “great.” Farther into town, the C.M. Russell Museum enshrines local cowboy artist Charlie Russell. The cowpoke and cattle-drive canvases at first seem like the kind of nostalgic art a Texas oil billionaire might favor. But as images of a vanishing world, they hold a lingering melancholy.
Come cocktail hour, I’m pulling up to the O’Haire Motor Inn’s Sip ’n Dip Lounge. Friends told me about the Sip ’n Dip, a motel bar that underwent a tiki makeover in the ’90s. I step out of a hot, bright early evening and into a dim, fishnet-draped grotto. Behind the bar, windows reveal a mermaid as she drifts through shimmering turquoise water in the motel pool, lithe in a bodysuit, her supple tail floating behind her.
The Sip ’n Dip is crowded with Great Falls couples dressed for a night on the town. I scan the cocktail menu: the Mermaid Kiss, the Drunken Monkey. I order a Tropical Tiki Dream, which arrives in a vast glass fishbowl. The mermaid glides the length of the bar, rises for air, returns. She waves. She holds up a hand-lettered sign: call me on my shell phone.
I have fallen into my Tropical Tiki Dream. I wonder whether, in his waning moments of life, Old Sol was granted a vision of mermaids, the sirens of the Sip ’n Dip, beckoning him to the great beyond.
Mile 357: Livingston, Montana
I approach Livingston the way James Joyce devotees approach Dublin; Elena Ferrante fans, Naples. I am a pilgrim visiting a sacred site. Livingston is where the 1975 comic western Rancho Deluxe was filmed. Scripted by local novelist Thomas McGuane, Rancho offers Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston as hipster cattle rustlers and Elizabeth Ashley as a rich, bored rancher’s wife who slinks across the screen growling, “Come on, goddamn it! I want gothic ranch action around here!” Also Jimmy Buffett, who sings about rockin’ and a rollin’ on a Livingston Saturday night.
The adolescent me was stirred by Rancho Deluxe’s portrait of cowboy-stoner debauchery. I was not the only one. The movie bombed when it was released, but it has since amassed a cult following. The desk clerk at the historic Murray Hotel tells me that guests want to stay where the Deluxe cast bunked and partied. His movie review: “I thought it was pretty weird. But then again, I grew up in Livingston around that time, and it was pretty weird.” He adds that some guests are disappointed to learn that the scene where Bridges and Waterston install a prize bull in a hotel room wasn’t filmed at the Murray. “That was filmed in a Best Western over in Bozeman,” the clerk says. “But it was based on the time Will Rogers put his horse in the elevator here.”
I take the elevator to my room. It is creaky and cramped, and I can’t see how Will Rogers or anybody else could fit a horse into it.
After I stroll the likable downtown, I hit the Murray bar. Not rockin’ and a rollin’, exactly, but I am happy to be here. How much I missed bars during the COVID years, the clink of shot glasses, the overheard dissing of bad bosses and bad exes. A woman takes the barstool next to mine and orders a huckleberry mule—a Moscow mule made with Montana huckleberry vodka—to cool down.
She’s lived in Livingston a while, she tells me, and she likes it. It hasn’t been swamped by the rich Californians who have spoiled Bozeman, an hour down the road. “The minute I saw the billboards advertising liposuction and private-jet flights, I thought, Bozeman is wrecked.”
Mile 412: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Highway 89 enters Yellowstone National Park on a note of triumph: the Roosevelt Arch, weighty brown basalt, built in 1903 and named for President Teddy, who dedicated it. The arch shouts: I’m Yellowstone! I’m big! I’m important! The first national park in the United States!
It was my first national park, too, toured on a family road trip when I was seven. It wasn’t my parents’ dream vacation—they preferred golf courses—and I think they were doing it out of a sense of duty. I was wowed. Yellowstone had things that exploded—geysers! Things that smelled like farts—sulfur springs! Things that could eat you—bears! No other place in the world so appeals to the seven-year-old mind.
Even now, driving south toward Old Faithful Geyser, I’m bouncing with elementary school anticipation. This is tempered when I arrive at the parking lot. It is full. Of Yellowstone’s four million–plus visitors per year, nearly three-quarters arrive between May and September.
The park’s classic attractions retain their magnetic power. Bison (everywhere, blocking traffic), bears (many black bears, no grizzlies in sight), bubbling mud pots. I hike the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the 1,200-foot-deep chasm cut by the Yellowstone River, which tumbles beneath golden cliffs and plummets, twice, in waterfalls that churn seraphic clouds of mist. You give into Yellowstone. Even with the crowds and traffic jams, it defies complaint. It defeats irony.
My last night there, I join the Old West Dinner Cookout. It’s a big production, seven covered wagons, each carrying a couple dozen dinner guests and pulled by two 2,000-pound Percheron horses to a rustic cookhouse and the promise of “real cowboy grub.” We arrive, climb from our covered wagons, line up for steak and beans, and find seats at splintery wooden tables.
A place that opens itself to you opens you to the people around you. We cookout patrons are from all over. We listen to wranglers tell jokes and sing cowboy songs. We talk with one another in ways I am not used to in the aloof Bay Area I call home. On my left, a couple in licorice-black biker leathers, the woman with Cher-worthy eye shadow and a turquoise feather in her long hair. They’ve ridden their Harley from Florida to Yellowstone and are heading to the August motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. On my right, a reserved older couple from Kansas City. Together, we compare notes on geysers and real estate prices in Kansas City and Florida and California. Recognizing our limits, we leave politics alone.
There are more jokes, more songs. The evening light is sweet. Kids run off to have their photos taken with the Percherons, run back when the dinner bell sounds for peach cobbler.
“Don’t you love road trips?” the Harley woman asks me. I do.
The man from Kansas City finishes his cobbler. He says he is 81 years old and that Yellowstone is his and his wife’s first vacation since his emergency quintuple bypass: “A real widow-maker. That’s what I had. My surgeon told me she thought they were going to wheel me out in a body bag. But look. I’m here.”
Mile 546: Jackson, Wyoming
Notes I dictate to my iPhone while walking around Jackson:
Jackson is the town, Jackson Hole the surrounding valley.
Jackson part Family Guy ($20 T-shirt shops) and part Succession ($4,000-a-night hotel rooms).
Town Square’s Elk Antler Arches big attraction. Each arch: 14,000 pounds elk antlers.
Teton County richest county in nation. Per capita income: $471,751.
Mile 692: Garden City, Utah
The northern Utah stretch of U.S. 89 is—there can be no dispute—the best ice cream road in the world. You can devise sociological explanations for this—for instance, that, having forgone tobacco and alcohol, Mormon Utah embraced butterfat. But any need for explanation vanishes when my first order arrives: Thick, creamy, insistently pink, the Famous Raspberry Shake at Garden City’s LaBeau’s Drive-in lives up to the hype.
Over the mountains in Logan, the food sciences students at Utah State University’s Aggie Ice Cream create flavors like Aggie Birthday Cake and Aggie Chocolate Cherry. I lap up a double waffle cone of Aggie Blue Mint.
Third up and most essential: Ogden’s Farr Better Ice Cream, founded in 1929 by Asael Farr, one of the 39 children of Lorin Farr, the city’s first mayor. The shop is surpassingly ice-creamy, with pistachio walls and a giant alphabetized menu of flavors, from Almond Divinity to Zebra Stripes. I get a combo of German Chocolate Cake and Orange Cremo and find a window seat.
I’m always happy to be at Farr’s, but especially today. All the ice cream, I realize, has been an attempt at distraction. The moment I crossed the Utah border, I was gripped by the unease you feel when returning to a place you once called home. You measure how it’s changed—more houses, more traffic. How you’ve changed—older, warier. I am also ruminating over tomorrow’s stop. Thankfully, concentrating on Farr’s Orange Cremo helps melt the worry away.
Mile 814: Salt Lake City, Utah
“Let’s get you going,” Millie tells me.
We are sitting, Millie and I, at a computer station in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. Bright, lime-carpeted, the library radiates the airy optimism of a well-funded children’s museum.
Millie says, “Type in anything you know.”
Here’s what I know. I plotted my Highway 89 journey to allow a visit to the library. I did this because the family story I grew up with was, in ways, untrue. For people like me—and in this era of easy genetic testing, there are burgeoning numbers of us—the library is a gift, providing access to genealogical records for 20.5 billion people, one of the largest collections in the world. Created to facilitate the Mormon doctrine of proxy baptism (you need to know who your ancestors are before you can baptize them posthumously into your faith), the library is open to all. Show up and you are immediately paired with a volunteer like the grandmotherly, computer-adept Millie.
I tell her my story. I spent my childhood in Salt Lake City, then moved with my parents to California. Well into middle age, I was informed by my 90-year-old father that I had been adopted. I then learned through 23andMe that I had a living birth mother and four half siblings. There was one missing piece: my birth father.
My new siblings told me I was the product of my birth mother’s extramarital affair, a fact I opt not to share with Millie. They did not know who the man was. My birth mother’s mind was clouded by Alzheimer’s; she could provide no information, even if she had wanted to. Through 23andMe, I identified a possible suspect. I had a name and a birth year. I type these into the computer. A branch pops up on my new family tree. K.M., I will call him, born in Pennsylvania. Millie looks pleased. I double-click on K.M.’s entry. Two daughters appear.
“Those would be your half sisters,” Millie says.
I foresee my new family tree sprouting branch after branch of unknown relatives. I have made a mistake. I thank Millie. I say I need to leave.
I walk out into summer Salt Lake City, the sun polishing the stone spires of the Mormon temple. I am fond of the city. My parents—my adoptive parents, but I still stumble on that term—didn’t take to it. We moved here for my father’s career; he and my mother missed their beach-and-cocktail life in Southern California, to which we eventually returned. But I liked the hot summers and the snowy winters, the way the city pressed against the Wasatch Range. I liked Salt Lake’s sense of order, the granite weight of the church buildings, how Brigham Young had platted the city with Newtonian precision, centering it on Temple Square. It was the same impulse that led the church to chart every human being who ever lived, storing the records in the cloud and in a concrete vault in Little Cottonwood Canyon, said to be strong enough to survive a nuclear blast.
What has been hard these past few years is having my own sense of order upended. My adoptive parents were wonderful; I was a much-loved only child. My mother died too young, but my father lived long enough to be a doting father-in-law and grandfather. It has hurt me to be angry with him for keeping secrets from me. When I think about searching for my birth father, I feel disloyal.
I drive toward the mountains, turn onto Wasatch Boulevard and then up a hill to my childhood home, a little ranch house near the base of Mount Olympus. I park and step out of the car to look down across the city. The afternoon is hazy, but I make out the temple’s symmetrical spires and the street grid, the ways we devise to contain the messiness of our lives.
Mile 941: Manti, Utah
South of Salt Lake, U.S. 89 ambles through Utah ranch country, passing little towns named from the Old Testament or the Book of Mormon: Ephraim, Manti, Moroni. I turn on the car radio. I spent much of my work life as a travel writer driving roads like these, and it occurs to me that as much as I remember where I went, I remember even more of what I listened to. Especially at night—and it’s almost night now—when you drifted into a radio world that was floating, strange. I would be fighting to stay awake, swigging sludgy Circle K coffee and turning the radio up loud. Delilah’s advice to the lovelorn, Art Bell’s conspiratorial revelations about the aliens who dwelt at the center of the earth.
One program haunted me: The Herb Jepko Nitecap Show, broadcast by Salt Lake’s powerhouse 50,000-watt KSL. It ran from midnight to dawn, its audience, in one description, insomniacs “but also on‐duty firemen, nightshift service station attendants, the elderly, the lonely.” Listeners from Denver to Phoenix phoned Herb to share what was on their sleepless minds. A casserole recipe. A favorite poem. A dying friend. They called themselves the Nitecaps. They had their own song:
We’re the Nitecaps, NiteyNite Caps
And our hearts are light and gay
As we rally round our Nitecap Show
On the brand-new side of the day.
If I could call in to Herb now, I’d ask whether I should keep searching for my birth father or hang it up. Herb would respond in his warm, bourbon-smoothed DJ’s voice, reassuring but noncommittal, letting me find my own path.
Mile 1,111: Mount Carmel, Utah
On this brand-new side of the day, U.S. 89 is a red rock highway, pulling you south to Bryce Canyon and Zion and Grand Staircase–Escalante, to arches and narrows, fierce carmine cliffs darkened by desert varnish, a landscape sweeping and harsh, intimate and carnal.
I hike into Bryce Amphitheater, where orange hoodoos rise like Halloween ghosts. In Zion, I follow the Watchman Trail for the view of 2,200-foot Watchman Spire; I submit to the wavy geometry of Checkerboard Mesa, trying to count the squares. I’m reminded of something that struck me days ago, at the C.M. Russell Museum in Montana: how urgently the American West impels people to create something from it. A painting, a poem. Just outside Zion, in Mount Carmel, the Thunderbird Foundation has opened the cabin and studio of Maynard Dixon, whose art caught Zion’s brilliant sculptural beauty. Later, after Dixon’s death, Vladimir Nabokov spent a season in the same cabin, chasing Utah butterflies and writing, because writers feel the urgency too.
Also moviemakers. Just below Zion, Kanab was for decades known as Little Hollywood for the quantity of movies filmed there—from Union Pacific to The Outlaw Josey Wales, all taking advantage of a landscape with a camera-ready dazzle to it, buttes and mesas to fill a CinemaScope screen and shine on a 25-inch RCA console color TV. I call it a day at the Parry Lodge, where the rooms are named for famous former guests (Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Ronald Reagan) and the swimming pool was built with the help of John Wayne. He needed a place to relax after a long, hot day on the set.
Mile 1,338: Flagstaff, Arizona
A road trip gives you space to pursue quirky interests. Astronomy was, once, one of mine. I was a teenage buff, a county astronomical society member, a subscriber to Sky and Telescope. When I plotted my route along U.S. 89, Lowell Observatory loomed large.
The observatory, atop Mars Hill in Flagstaff, is famous for a scientific failure and a triumph. Boston rich guy Percival Lowell founded it in 1894 to prove his pet theory that the planet Mars was laced with canals built by Martians. That proved delusional. But in 1930, the observatory discovered the solar system’s ninth planet: Pluto. Worldwide acclaim followed.
A lifetime later came the fall. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union deemed Pluto too small, with an orbit too eccentric—tilted at a 17-degree angle from the others—to be a true planet. It was downgraded to “dwarf planet,” like a struggling pitcher sent back to the minors.
Standing in the cool Arizona night, I identify with the planet. Say you’ve been told all your life you belong to a group. A solar system. A family. Then you’re told, No, you don’t. I understand that unsettled feeling. Eccentric orbit? I understand that, too.
I peer into Northern Arizona’s inky night skies through a Starstructure 32-inch Dobsonian, one of half a dozen telescopes Lowell makes available most evenings. A clear view of the universe pulls you out of yourself like nothing else. Here, in summer, the Milky Way lassos the night in brilliance. I don’t spot Pluto, but it’s out there, I know, secure in its eccentric orbit, spinning through the dazzle.
Mile 1,417: Grand Canyon, Arizona
Officially, U.S. 89 completes its journey in Flagstaff. But the Grand Canyon lies just to the north. It seemed criminal to be so close and not pay respects. I have explored the canyon a dozen times over the years, by foot, by mule, by raft. But my son, Joe, was a stranger to it. That seemed criminal too. I planned for this road trip to close with Joe flying in from North Carolina to join me.
Now, he and I are taking the trail to Desert View, on the eastern edge of the canyon. Late afternoon, the tail end of an August monsoon. Bruised thunderheads, beatific shafts of sunlight, distant veils of falling rain. The canyon, washed brilliant orange and ocher by the storm; the regal, indifferent maze of mesas and buttes, temples and shrines. The Colorado River coils thousands of feet below.
“It’s gigantic,” Joe murmurs. “Jesus Christ.”
We stay put on the canyon rim as afternoon dims. Far off, a lightning strike, a cobalt Y splintering against a purple mesa. Thunder.
It’s a complicated thing, fatherhood. The paternal mix of hope and worry, the fear that you haven’t done enough or have done the wrong thing. Joe is 27 now, complete. Whatever help I gave him, whatever damage I have inflicted, it’s in the past.
We are similar in some ways and not in others. We both like action movies and ice cream. He’s more handsome than I ever was and more athletic, a pickup-basketball ace at home on courts from San Francisco’s Mission district to Madrid. He’s an economist, plotting life in probabilities, endogenous variables. I’m hazier, dreamier. When Joe was young, I took him on pilgrimages to the natural wonders that were sacred to me. Redwood groves, Sierra peaks. He liked them well enough, but as an adult does not seek them out. I thought if I brought him to the Grand Canyon, he might understand a little more about me.
I’ve devised a plan: three days here, an ambitious hike each day. Our warming planet has other ideas. A heat dome is clamping down on the Southwest. Canyon daytime highs are rising to over 105 degrees. At every trailhead, park service bulletins warn hikers to be off trails by 10 a.m.
The next morning, Joe and I arrive at the Bright Angel trailhead at 6:15. Our day packs jostle with water bottles. Our faces are shaded by the giant REI sun hats my wife insisted we wear. Joe’s makes him look dashing and insouciant; I look like the geezer who demands that you sign his petition at the farmers’ market.
Few other hikers descend with us: a spry local couple with hiking poles, a family from Maine. We’re all dancing around mule poop from yesterday’s trail rides. But the canyon is doing its work. Entering it is like entering a dream. The chasm that from the rim looks painted and imaginary takes on weight and physicality. The dust rising from the trail; the chalky, medicinal smell of the Coconino sandstone canyon walls; the way the walls unfold before us with each turn of a switchback.
We pause for water and see the trail zigzagging below us. I ask Joe what he thinks. “It’s hard to be prepared for the Grand Canyon,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense until you get here.”
That’s our routine. Morning hike. Then Joe works in our room. I amble along the South Rim looking at things. I am, still, brooding about my birth father, wondering whether I should continue my quest to find him. I’m thinking about my adoptive father, remembering his Lions Club courtliness, his deep decency. I wish I had brought him here—we talked about a trip, but never did it—and I’m glad I’ve brought his namesake grandson.
On our final morning, I visit the Trail of Time, which hugs the South Rim to explicate the canyon’s 1.8-billion-year geological history. Each meter you walk equals one million years. Rock samples—Elves Chasm gneiss, Vishnu schist—are posed on pedestals, matching the canyon walls below them. I arrive at a section labeled “The Great Unconformity.” An information panel explains that the vagaries of geology have erased 1.2 billion years of canyon history, “like chapters torn from a book.”
I look out to the canyon, trying to see where the 1.2 billion years of history aren’t. No luck. In the morning light, the canyon walls glow with watercolor blurriness. It strikes me that the Great Unconformity is not something I will miss, not when so much around it is so beautiful. And that my missing birth father is my own Great Unconformity. A lacuna, a gap, but not a gap I need to fill. He was who he was, he likely never knew anything about me, and that is fine when in so many other ways I have been given so much.
It is time to hit the road to the airport. The car interior is encrusted with debris from the 1,400 miles I’ve driven. A Butterfinger wrapper, a crumpled “Visit Choteau” brochure. I back out of the hotel parking lot. Joe chugs his Muscle Milk. All of it is good.•
Peter Fish is a writer, editor, and teacher specializing in California and the American West. He lives in San Francisco.
