Wondering the West – Travel

Finding peace and solace amongst natures greatest creations.

Story & Photography By Molly Herb

Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 2 (March/April 2026)

It was shortly after 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve when I reached for the windshield wiper lever, nudging it higher, only to realize it was already maxed out. As fast as they’d go. Not nearly fast enough. Damn.

The rain came down in sheets, gum-ball-sized bursts exploding against the glass, smearing the road into abstraction. No shoulder. No margin. Construction barrels squeezed the highway into a single narrow lane, their blinking orange lights mocking me as oncoming headlights detonated into white blindness. For brief moments, I just hoped the road stayed where it belonged.

I’d been on the road for hours, heading west somewhere past Gallup, New Mexico—the last familiar name on the map—into nowhere with my twelve-pound, self-appointed navigator Coco, half chihuahua, half Velcro, fully uninterested in directions. We’d just closed the year at Cityview Magazine.

I was wrung out.
Empty.
Ready to exhale.

I’d lost track of how long I’d been on that road, white-knuckling forward, shoulders locked, music turned down as if silence might sharpen my vision. Then, just like that, the rain stopped. The road reappeared. My shoulders dropped. A Chevron glow surfaced in the distance like a mirage. I didn’t need gas. I didn’t need snacks. I needed to stop driving.

Inside, before I could even speak, the young attendant looked up and said, “A lot of people sleep in their cars here. You’re good.” I thanked him quietly and retreated to the back of my car, grateful beyond words, as there were few alternate choices than this tiny gas station.

Valley of the Rising Sun

The West holds a kind of darkness all its own. It wrapped around me for nearly an hour as I followed a narrow canyon road shortly after 6am, rain thinning to mist. I had no idea where I was, blindly following the GPS, seeing only as far as my high beams allowed. Everything else disappeared.

Then the storm clouds broke just enough. Navy blue softened into teal, then electric blue, then pastel orange and pink. Christmas morning arrived with a gift. The sky became a moving canvas, light spilling across the landscape. Jagged mountains tore through the earth, unanchored by trees, roads, or anything familiar. In this place, perspective simply didn’t exist. And it was magnificent.

A True Loss for Words

The road into Monument Valley slowed me to a crawl. Not by design, by necessity. Every mile demanded stopping. The lingering rain eased. The sun broke through. Light moved intentionally, like a roaming spotlight guiding a private tour. I remember being on the phone and slowly losing language. Words unraveled into sounds. Awe replaced explanation.

The twenty-five miles from Kayenta to the visitor center took three times longer than it should have, and I wouldn’t change a second of it. At the gate, a sign read “MONUMENT VALLEY LOOP TRAIL CLOSED. PRIVATE TOURS ONLY”. An oversight entirely my fault. Holiday closures weren’t part of the plan. I smiled anyway, snapped a quick photo of the formations, climbed back in, looked at Coco and said, “Monument Valley may be taking Christmas off, but we aren’t.” I pointed the car west and we settled in for the two-hour drive to our next destination. Wait! Is that a wild horse? Brake lights. Dust. A sharp side-eye from the dog. “Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “It’s a wild horse.”

Page, Arizona would be next. And Page, I soon learned, sold beauty by the ticket.

A Vending Machine for Beauty

Page, Arizona arrived with a price tag. The town knew exactly what it was doing. Opportunity met demand. Beauty became infrastructure. Gates went up. Ticket booths and gift shops followed. “Insert money, receive view, move along” might as well have been printed on the sign. I won’t fault Page for it. It saw something extraordinary and figured out how to manage the crowd. Still, the pay-per-view approach landed differently after the quiet I’d been chasing. Being frugal—and mildly stubborn—I chose the cheapest option: Horseshoe Bend, where a handwritten sign greeted me: NO FEE TODAY. FREE ENTRY. “Score,” I said out loud, as if saving those ten dollars counted as a personal victory.

At the edge of everything, looking down, you learn how vast the world is and how small you are within it.

People as far as the eye could see gathered along the rim for sunset. A guardrail offered safety only if you were lucky enough to wedge into one of the few remaining gaps. The rest of us trusted balance and strangers. I set up my tripod, took a few careful steps forward, and leaned forward just enough to look down.  Six inches from the edge was a thousand-foot drop straight to the river below—taller than any building back home—and to that end, I shuffled back as one look was enough. Inner dialog failing me I turned to a nearby couple “That kind of fall would really give you time to reflect on your life choices. You’d be falling for almost ten seconds.” They smiled and backed away.  I lingered until the sun slipped out of sight. Chilled to the bone, I was reminded that awe doesn’t require solitude, but solitude does change how it lands. 

After three days on the road, I’d like to say I resisted the lure of a real bed and hot shower. I didn’t. A $37 motel sign appeared like divine intervention, but I should have kept driving. For the price of two fast-food meals, I got sheets auditioning for a detergent commercial, carpet dirtier than my shoes, and a door that didn’t latch. A call to the office resulted in a man with a screw driver showing up 20 minutes later. Naturally I let him in. He removed the strike plate entirely. Problem solved, I guess. I was too tired to complain and with the security of a latched door I blinked and the night was over.

Morning came, I was promptly greeted by the same man, shortly after opening my door.  “You can just leave the door open when you go.” He said with a smile “Didn’t know I had a choice,” I replied with a smirk—already setting my sights on the complimentary breakfast. A suspiciously stale bagel and something resembling coffee later It was obvious I had learned nothing. I left Page with the aftertaste of commodified beauty in my mouth or maybe it was the brown water they called coffee. Either way, wherever we ended up next had to have more than 2-stars and unstained sheets.

Destination Unknown,But Not Unintended

Highway 89A stretched endlessly ahead. The destination I’d pinned promised solitude and sandstone. What I saw was flat road and familiar mountains. “Think we’ve been duped,” I said. Coco lifted her head, unimpressed. A sign appeared: VERMILION CLIFFS NATIONAL MONUMENT.

A dirt road flashed past. I braked, turned around, this wasn’t a road side glimpse, this was merely the warning sign: hazards, terrain, wildlife. One line repeated with enthusiasm.

High-clearance, 4×4 required.

I glanced at my Subaru Outback Wilderness. Nine and a half inches of clearance. AWD. I hoped marketing hadn’t lied. A cattle guard rattled beneath the tires. Game on.

Immense Beauty, Deafening Silence

Three hours and half a tank of gas later, I eased over what amounted to the final boss of cattle guards. Car-sized ruts lay scattered like a minefield—a clear reminder that precision wasn’t optional. Holding my breath, I threaded through without disappearing into any of the voids of shame. Beyond that point, there was no road. No trail. I continued on foot.

I zigzagged through the desert, climbing white “brain rocks,” their surfaces frozen mid–lava bubble, and stumbled into a small oasis—a twisted tree rising from sand, shallow water reflecting the sky. Then the silence hit. Absolute. Crushing. With the outside world gone, everything inside me turned up. My breathing sounded like wind. My heartbeat echoed. Even blinking had volume. I shot until I shouldn’t have, then kept going. Light vanished. Warmth followed.

Then the silence hit. Absolute. Crushing.

My jacket sat forgotten on a rock a few hundred yards away and far above me. I’d drifted well north of my intended line. The walk back would be long. Moonlight helped. One bar of service helped more. The Subaru app optimistically promised a twenty-five-minute walk.

When I finally opened the tailgate, I found evidence of Coco’s ongoing stomach rebellion—a last-ditch attempt to distance herself from her sleeping area that ended far too close to mine. Thirty-degree air accelerated cleanup. We settled in for a long, cold night.

Morning arrived with snow, panic, and the hope that twenty miles of deep sand, ruts, and washboard hadn’t trapped us. Relief came. Then pavement. Monument Valley called again.

Temporarily Permanent

The car was dark and cold. Remote start was essential this early. Twenty-seven degrees—cold enough to see your breath even inside. No time or heat to waste. Pack it up and hit the road. At the gate, a young Navajo man glanced at my receipt, then my car, and said, “Stay on the trail.” Luxury SUVs floated past like they belonged on red carpets, not red dirt. Signs warned of snakes and stopping. I obeyed by slowing to a crawl and hanging my camera out the window. The scale never let up. These formations feel permanent to us, but to Earth they’re no more permanent than a sandcastle to a tide. At a small outpost: coffee, fry bread, chickens, kittens, and a man on a horse straight out of a western. I waited as underdressed tourists cycled through—ten dollars, a photo, dust, repeat.

Eventually the man stepped away, the horse lingered, and I settled for a single frame. Good enough. Back in the car, Coco sneezed into my coffee. You get used to it. I forgave her.

We kept going. But where to next lingered—until it didn’t. One word surfaced and refused to leave: cactus. I pointed the car south and drove.

Saguaro National Park arrived before sunrise. Cartoon cacti stood everywhere, flanked by every plant your parents ever warned you not to touch. Naturally, I touched all of them. The sunrise underperformed. The cacti did not. Fingers first, ankles later—both paid for my curiosity. It was painfully beautiful. By midday, it was time to move on. Something bigger was waiting.

The Perfect Ending 

A few hundred yards from the parking lot at White Sands National Park, noise dissolved. Further out, even voices vanished. Coco stopped, looked at her leash before looking at me. I unclipped it, and finally herself again, she floated across the dunes as if untethered by gravity. We walked west for hours until there was no one left but us. We sat atop the tallest dune, backs to the sun, cool sand beneath us. Time passed only by shadow before the light dipped and the cold crept in. Two glossy eyes told me it was time, not for another adventure, but to go home.