We swing south to Albuquerque, catching I-40 west for a few miles. The earth turns redder, with a thin frosting of green -- junipers, snakeweed, and shrubs on the mesa tops. The sky is impossibly blue, littered with tufts of white cloud. Just before the city the oil pressure gauge unaccountably drops. If the 1995 F-350 has a weakness it's the gauges, which are notorious for giving faulty information. Hooking up a better engine monitoring system is high on my list of things to do, but there was no time before this trip. I contemplate stopping at a diesel shop in Albuquerque, but decide against it when the gauge seems to return to normal. Probably a bad gauge. We ditch the interstate as soon as we get through Albuquerque. On the map last night we found a thin black line, a remote looking road, just after the Acoma Pueblo, that weaves its way across the desert and up into the mountains around Show Low. We thought we'd give it a shot and see where it goes. We're the only vehicle that gets off I-40 at this exit, which is an encouraging sign. The road quickly turns to a narrow two lane strip of blacktop, meandering west, through the grasslands and scrub, toward a large escarpment of sandstone. We're too early to see the grass green. Most of the water here comes when the monsoon rolls through in July and August. Right now the land is at it's driest, the grass brittle and brown, and all but the biggest Tinajas are mere sandy holes in the rock. Only the Ponderosas, Pinyons, and junipers dotting the hills are green this time of year. When we reach the sandstone bluff the road turns to follow the base of it westward. Off to the right rivers of black rock flow down the side the hills and into the small valley. It looks more like Hawaii than New Mexico. The dark lava flows are almost as recent as they look, several are only a few thousand years old. The Zuni in the nearby Acuena pueblo have been here long enough to have stories of when the lava flowed. Part of the reason the Zuni live in this area is that when they first arrived there were lava caves, which made good shelters and held water, always the most difficult thing to find in this land. We're skirting the edge of the El Malpais National Conservation Area, home to La Ventana, one of the bigger arches in the southwest. Given more time we'd have stopped to spend some time here. There's a campground we could have stayed at and at night hundreds of thousands of bats fly out of some of the lava tubes in the area, but we're on a tight schedule unfortunately, and need to be in Tucson in two days. We have to get by with seeing the arch from the parking lot, and saving the bats for another trip. There's always something you have to save for the next time. And more than seeing, this is a trip of long distance driving. Eventually the sandstone bluff drops away and it's wide open high desert grassland as far as you can see. And it is good to see so far. I remember when I come out this way that whatever else I might have become, I am at heart a westerner. The endless horizon and huge open skies that give some people vertigo and all manner of uneasiness, feel natural to me. The way the world should be. The western sky is as much a part of the land as the land. The only other place that's true is on the ocean. Nothing feels quite like home to me as seeing a wide open expanse of land with the horizon so far away it's hard to see where the land ends and the sky begins. Eventually the road begins to head upward, climbing steadily toward the White Mountains. Towering Ponderosa pines become more common. We're on the south eastern edge of the Mogollon Rim, where the Colorado Plateau drops down into lower central Arizona. Tomorrow we'll trace that transition from the mountains down to the saguaros and cacti of the Sonora desert. Tonight we grab a campsite outside of Show Low and cook dinner over a fire. Surprisingly camp fires are allowed here. The west has become very skittish of fire. Decades of poor land management have left much of this land extremely vulnerable to wildfire. Throw in drought, pine bark beetles, irresponsible people and you have a recipe for devastating fires. Part of the reason we first went to the great lakes area -- which we now call home -- is that we were tired of the stress of not knowing if or when a campground out west would close. And often there was nowhere else to go when things did shut down1. The shores of Lake Superior proved a more relaxed, reliable place to spend our summers2, and so we did. But here in Show Low at least fire doesn't seem to be a concern right now. The road from Show Low to Tucson drops down out of the White Mountains and into the desert. About half way out of the mountains there's a turn off for Fort Apache. For a long time Fort Apache was the Army base from which soldiers, assisted by White Mountain Apache scouts, fought the various other Apache bands in Arizona, including Geronimo's band of Chiricahua Apache. We've seen the Chiricahua Apache's homeland in southern Arizona, and been to the prison where Geronimo was held for many years. Fort Apache felt like a missing connection, the other side of the story perhaps. The drive in is a quiet winding road through the White Mountain Apache reservation. We didn't see another car until we were in the town of Fort Apache, and we were the only people at the fort. Fort Apache is not a fort in the traditional sense of western forts. It came after the need to defend against attacks and does not have a surrounding wall. It was a staging area, what we'd call an Army base today. The historical site is managed by the White Mountain Apache tribe, who've created a little visitor center with info on the tribe's history, and a little bit of the fort's history. Several of the old fort buildings have been restored, though there's only a couple that are open to the public. The old schoolhouse is still in use, now administered by the tribe. We wandered the grounds for a while. The desert here is quiet and cool this time of year. Perhaps always. The river behind the fort area is lined with tall cottonwoods. It's a beautiful location, you can see why people would live here, but something about the place, perhaps its history, didn't make us linger. We headed back out to the highway, again seeing no other cars between Fort Apache and the main road, and turned left, bound, finally, for Tucson. Highway 66 makes a very dramatic pass through the Salt River canyon on its way south. For all our travels in the bus, this kind of rugged, steep canyon country isn't something the kids have seen a lot of because this is the sort of road that the bus just wasn't capable of driving. The truck had no such troubles, winding through the hairpin curves without a thought and climbing thousands of feet without dropping more than a gear. At the bottom of the canyon there's a very large pullout parking area, with stairs down to the river. We stopped for a bit and wandered around the river banks to take a break from driving. Back up in the parking lot, several people were standing beside overheated vehicles,and one guy was underneath his old Jeep with a litter of tools on the ground beside him. His wife and kids waited patiently in the back. The kids and I looked at each other. How many times had that been us? Too many to keep track of. I considered asking if he needed help, but overheard him tell someone else he had it under control. I never wanted help either. After the canyon of the Salt river the road wandered through the high desert, down to Globe where we took a left and continued our descent down into the desert, until pretty soon the hills were dotted with Saguaros and we were on the outskirts of Tucson. Even when fires don't threaten campgrounds directly, they are often shut down to use as staging areas for fire crews. ↩ Our area does get its share smoke from fires in Canada and the Boundary Waters, but so far no actual fires have threatened anything around us. ↩

My daughters have been grappling (both in juijitsu and wrestling) since they were eight years old. This winter marks almost six years of training (with some gaps when we were on the road). In all that time they've never really tested themselves in any formal way. They've wrestled in a handful of small, local competitions, but that's it. As a parent it's always hard to judge your children's abilities—are they really good? Or am I just biased because of course I think they're really good? Impossible to say, and probably not your place anyway. All you can do is encourage them. But when the girls got the chance to wrestle at the Wisconsin youth state wrestling tournament, they didn't need any encouragement, they both jumped on it. The nearest qualifying matches were about four hours away. Since we couldn't both go to the qualifying match and states, Corrinne and I decided to split it up. She took them down to the qualifier and if they made it I'd take them to states. I did not see their qualifying matches in person, though I did get to see the videos later. Lilah wrestled what both her coach and her most experienced teammate called a perfect match, which is the grappling equivalent of pitching a perfect game. Alas, just as in baseball, pitching a perfect game does not get you to the World Series. Despite that win, she was eliminated in a later bracket and did not make it to the state championships. Olivia was undefeated at the qualifier and not only made it to states, but got a first round by. Two weeks later, on the morning of a late winter snow storm, the kids and I headed down to Madison for the Wisconsin Youth State Championship. The girls portion of the tournament was on Sunday, but we drove down on Friday to catch some of the Saturday matches so they could cheer on their teammates. This left us with a good bit of time to explore Madison. We broke down here once in the bus, but other than that quick pass thru, we'd never been. The truth is we're not really city people anymore, but since we were downtown we walked around and stopped in at the state capital building. I don't really think of us as living in Wisconsin. Where we are feels totally detached from the rest of the world. But when in Rome, go to the Vatican I guess. The capital building was an interesting reminder of how making beautiful things used to be a cultural priority. Even the elevator doors weren't just elevator doors. I wasn't quite sure how states would go for Olivia. At her age finding the delicate balance between self-confidence and humility -- which is a tight rope walk on the best of days -- isn't easy, and too much of either can send you spiraling into places you're better off not going. To my mind this is why sports exist though, to help you find that balance. They are fundamentally contests of will and spirit, but with a healthy side of real-world, rubber-meets-the-road physical ability you either have or are still working toward. And whenever you start to feel like you're getting somewhere in your corner of the world, the larger world is out there to remind you that it exists too, and it might well have been training harder, and for longer, than you have. This year at the Wisconsin Youth State Championships there were almost 900 girls competing. Girls youth wrestling has exploded in popularity over the past few years, which is amazing to see, but also means it's more competitive than ever. One small, focused group in the midst of a lot of chaos. Olivia ended up winning all but two of her six matches. She lost to the same girl twice, which put her in 4th place overall for her weight bracket. Considering she had only competed a handful of times in the past she was very happy with the results, and I realized it was probably the best outcome for her. She found that balance perfectly. Now she knows that she is a great wrestler, but she also knows she still has work to do to get better. One of the fun things about grappling is that no matter how good you are, you can always get better. Like her sister and the rest of her team, the minute we got home she wanted to start training again for next year's Youth State Championships. There is always next year.

I've never been much of a car driver. I had one in high school, but pretty shortly after I got a truck and never looked back. Trucks are an entirely different, and better, driving experience. You get an elevated view of the world, and the drive is more relaxed, like you're floating down the road, almost more like steering a boat than a car. At least in older trucks. From the day we bought our sticks and dirt, I've been searching for a new truck. New to me that is. I had no desire to buy an actually new truck. There hasn't been a decent vehicle made in well over a decade. Long time readers will know that I used to have a 1969 Ford F-250. Having now had a Ford and a Dodge, I thought maybe I'd get a Chevy truck to round things out. But I really want to learn my way around diesel engines, and when you start looking at diesel trucks, there's one engine that consistently rises to the top of every discussion: the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke. In particular the Powerstroke used in the Ford F-250 and F-350 from 1995-1998. As luck would have it, the crew cab version of this truck is also one of the few trucks that will comfortably fit five people and a dog. This engine is actually the smaller cousin of the engine in our school bus, the Ford Powerstroke being descended from the Navistar T444E engine, the smaller version of the engine in our schoolbus (the DT466E, also a legend among diesel enthusiasts). Finding a good condition, relatively low mileage, version of a 30-year-old truck that was only made for four years is challenging. It took me almost a year, but in the end I found what I was looking for down in Texas. Both this and the following image are from the original ad. Despite how it looks in this image, it's white and blue. This is the third time I've traveled a significant distance to buy an old vehicle. I don't consider it unusual to do so, but in talking with normal people I've parsed out that this is generally considered a strange, possibly quixotic thing to do. I never gave it much thought. I just lined up the money for the truck, booked the plane tickets, and jumped. The previous owner, who I'd talked to quite a bit on the phone, offered to pick me up at the San Antonio airport, so I flew down from Minneapolis and we drove the truck back up to Blanco, Texas where he lived. Luckily for me there's a Texas State Park right in the middle of Blanco, appropriately named Blanco State Park. I had already booked a campsite there that put me within walking distance of food, supplies, and most importantly, the bank. Blanco State Park flanks the spring-fed Blanco river, which cascades through the park in a series of small waterfalls. I'd guess about half the population of Blanco was out that evening fishing just above the start of the falls. It was a lovely warm evening with almost tropical breezes coming in ahead of a thunderstorm. I walked the river and watched the storm roll in, sweating a little in the evening heat, something I hadn't done in half a year. The storm hit just after sunset. I crawled in my tent and fell asleep to the sound of rain drops pounding on thin nylon. The next morning I got up and hiked downstream, marveling at signs of spring that wouldn't show in Wisconsin for at least another couple of months. It's strange how much something a simple as a flower can come to mean when you haven't seen one in so long. I flew down on a Sunday, figuring we'd go to the bank and start the money transfer process on Monday. Ideally I'd be on the road, back to Wisconsin, by mid week, Friday at the latest. The potential holdup is that I bank at a small credit union, which is somewhat old fashioned in the way it operates. I was worried they would not process the electronic transfer right away. But then we did something I will confess I haven't done in years. We went inside his bank and talked to an actual human being. That woman got on the phone with my bank, talked to another actual human being, and the money was in the seller's account about an hour later. Contrast that with when we bought the Jeep, where no humans were involved in the process and it took 4 days to transfer the money between accounts. Progress. The only downside to the quick turn around was that I didn't get to spend another night camping in Blanco. Instead I was on the road by early afternoon, whipping through the Texas Hill country, bound for Wisconsin. The truck ran flawlessly. That first day I never used the stereo, preferring to get to know the hum -- er, maybe more like soft roar -- of the engine. I took the back roads, avoiding Austin and other cities in a wide western arc of two lane blacktop that took me through plenty of small towns and the vast open beauty of the Texas hill country. I kept going an extra hundred miles after dark to make it out of Texas before I slept that first night. The second day I made it all the way up to middle Iowa without incident, and I was home by dinner on the third day. The Powerstroke did not disappoint. In the end it was a entirely uneventful drive, other than watching the price of diesel jump 15 cents a day. Fortunately the truck gets surprisingly good gas mileage. Despite being something of an beat up old farm truck, she's a very comfortable ride, perfect for the long road trips I have planned.

Here in the North, winter effectively begins with the first snow that doesn't melt. This year that was the day before Thanksgiving, almost exactly a month before the calendar says winter begins. It was heavy snow, over a foot, and just like that the world of color is gone. Everyone enjoys the first snow fall. It's a blanket of white that remakes the world, clean and new. The land brightens up. The white amplifies the scant daylight and the world feels brighter for a time, even as the sunrise grows ever later and sunset ever earlier. Several luxagraf readers have reached out to say that they were surprised we stayed for the winter, they'd assumed we had a snowbird lifestyle planned: stay up here in the summer and fall, and head to Florida for winter and spring. That actually is sort of what we had planned, but it hasn't worked out that way. Our kids are really into wrestling and the wrestling season, such as it is, runs roughly late November to early March, which means we stuck around for winter. It's a pretty common sentiment among those who don't live in winter that it's somehow miserable to be cold all the time. On one hand I understand that, and I feel it sometimes, but on the other hand it's not that hard to stay warm and there's something really great about lighting the bedroom wood stove on a cold morning, watching the frost on the windows melt as you warm your hands over the fire and wait for the coffee to boil. Our house has great southern exposure and good insulation, which means on sunny days in the winter we hardly need to heat it at all. The main living space is upstairs and it too had a wood stove. I would guess we lit it less than twenty five times all winter, and many times when we did we had to open the windows shortly thereafter. It's a strange thing to have to open your windows when it's 10F outside, but we have. The harder thing to do is get out in the cold. I would say the single most important things we learned in seven years on the road isn't travel-related at all, but that life was meant to be lived outdoors. We were meant to get up and go aside. I think this goes all the way back to the caves and shelters at the origin of humanity. Get up, go outside. That's how life was meant to be lived, but it's easier said than done when it's well below freezing outside. My wife is the best at this, or she was this winter. She's out walking nearly every morning. I'll admit I did not get out much. I came to prefer the warmth of the wood stove. I ended up moving my writing desk down to the coldest room of the house just so I could have more fires in the stove. But I did learn a good bit about dealing with cold. The biggest thing you need to enjoy the cold is warm feet. Solve that (I haven't quite yet) and you'll enjoy the winter much more. Next year I'd like to get some good snowshoes and maybe some cross country skis and see if I can get outside more with those. One of the nice things about winter is you can glide right through areas that are impassable when the summer undergrowth is in full swing. That opens up all kinds of things to do and see that you can't otherwise. I've been eyeing the boundary waters area for some possible winter ski trips next year.

A couple weeks after Olivia and I went to the north shore, Lilah decided she wanted to do a similar trip. The weather had turned much colder by then, reminding me why we used to head south long before now. I dug out the heavy sleeping bags and we bundled up for what was likely the last camping trip of the year. Even if we were willing to brave the snow and cold, all the campgrounds would soon be closed. It was a bright clear day, at least when we started out. The air was crisp but it was warm in the golden early morning light. We skipped Hawk Ridge and Duluth entirely this time and went straight to a pie shop, which is about the only place around Gooseberry Falls to get lunch. Betty’s Pies in Two Harbors claims to be world famous for its titular pies. I like tiny shops in out of the way places that call themselves world famous. I've always found it amusing that in many European countries you can't claim to be world famous, that would be false advertising (potentially, most likely anyway). It's funny because, well of course these places aren't world famous. Betty's is a little pie shop on the remote northern shore of Minnesota, the vast majority of the world doesn't even realize there's a state in America called Minnesota, let alone that it has a pie shop somewhere. But here in states there's no one telling you can't claim to be world famous if you want to. I guess we just have bigger grains of salt in these parts. World famous or not, Betty's was packed on a rainy, overcast day in late October. We waited 45 minutes for a table. We ended up with salads since there wasn't much else on the menu we could eat. We followed those up with some slices of pie. The pie wasn't half bad. I bet someone up the road in Canada has heard of Betty's, so world famous it is (hey, if it counts for the World Series, it counts for pies). Later we learned that the Rustic Inn Cafe apparently has better pies. Future exploration is warranted. Somewhere between salad and pie the sky clouded over and what little warmth there had been in the day disappeared. Our plan to hike around Gooseberry Falls sounded rather cold and forlorn. After debating what to do for a bit, we decided to abandon the lakeshore and drive up into the north woods. Just outside of Ely (pronounced Elee, should you ever find yourself in the area) there's a wolf sanctuary that Lilah had been wanting to visit for as long as we've been coming up here. For one reason or another we'd never made it, but after making some phone calls to ensure it was still open, we headed north. The land north of the lake quickly changes from the red iron of the shoreline area to rougher, rockier terrain with granite outcrops and boulder fields where the glaciers long ago laid down stones like a child emptying a pocket full of pebbles. This area has a more alpine feel to it, which reminded me of the Sierra Nevada. It's rugged, rough landscape that's hard to drive though -- you want to get out and explore, no matter how cold it might be. I can see why people love the boundary waters, which begins not far north of Ely. There were a disconcerting number of what looked like dying pine trees on the drive, all turned yellow. But there are a lot of dead pines around these days so I didn't think much of it at first. Then the forest became thick with these yellow trees. I'd never seen anything like it before. We stopped to check them out and realized they weren't dying, they were changing color. I'm not sure why, but a word popped in my head: Larch. I still don't know how or where I came up with Larch. Most Americans would call them Tamarack if they know of them at all, but most of us don't because they only really grow in Northern Minnesota and a few spots in the very northern Rockies and New England. There are two species in the U.S., the ones around here are Larix laricina. The striking feature of the Larch is that it's a deciduous conifer, its needles turns yellow every fall and then drop off when the first snows arrive. The wolves proved less striking than the Larch, opting to remain in their den sleeping for the duration of our visit. We still haven't seen the wolves at the wolf sanctuary. Afterward we wandered around Ely for a little while, marveling at the massive stacks of canoes in winter storage, which seem to be piled all over town. After a stop at a disappointing bookstore we decided it was time to find somewhere to camp. Car camping this time of year in these parts is challenging. Very little is open. We tried to ask at the forest service center in Ely, but it was closed for a government shutdown or something of that nature. Not having a ton of options, we set out for a campground a little ways out of town which should have still been open, according to the map anyway. Why would you close something at the end of a road like this? What is the point? Things started out promising. The road quickly turned to dirt, then to more of a double track through the woods, before finally ending at a campground on a lake. Which was closed. I considered camping their anyway. It was unlikely anyone would be checking up on the place on a Sunday night in October, and we didn't need anything more than a parking spot for the night. But in the end we decided to drive back down to Gooseberry Falls, not so much because we were worried about camping in a closed campground, but because it was supposed to be about 10-15 degrees warmer down by the lake. An hour later we were back at Lake Superior in a campsite at Gooseberry Falls. It was moderately warmer. We made a small fire and cooked some steak and potatoes. Later we sat around the fire, talking and staring up at the stars. But it wasn't long before we hit the familiar point every cold weather camper knows, where your front is warm from the fire, but your back is cold. Soon you're to shivering on one side, sweating on the other. The only real solution is to crawl in your sleeping bag and dream of summer.