Somewhere in Wyoming, the road disappeared.
Not metaphorically. It was just gone. Snow blowing sideways, the world scrubbed down to white, and the only proof we were still on a highway was a faint yellow line dissolving a few feet ahead of the car.
Then two headlights floated out of the blizzard, passed us, and vanished.
I shot it through the windshield.
And I remember thinking, this might be one of the best photos I take all year.
In the middle of nowhere, Wyoming.
Which is funny, because I'm the one who started calling these places the empty, boring, plain plains. Wyoming. Nebraska. South Dakota. And most of my friends agree. The drives through them are long, flat, and straight, with nothing on the map and nothing out the window for hours.
To be clear, Wyoming itself needs no defending. It has Yellowstone. The Tetons. The Wind River Range. Nobody calls those boring. It's the in-between that gets the reputation. The stretches you're supposed to sleep through.
At some point, I quietly decided to take that as a challenge.
If everyone in the car thinks there's nothing to see, fine. I'll find something.
And the land kept delivering.
Fog so thick the world went minimal. A single tree, a fence line, and everything else erased. Storm light spilling gold across hills nobody pulls over for. Horses standing in a prairie like they were placed there. Old barns and homesteads slowly being taken back by the grass. Two of my favorite photos this year came from exactly this. The trees half dissolved in that blizzard, and light and clouds doing something unrepeatable over Sunlight Basin.
None of these shots exist on a map. There's no trailhead. No pin to drop. You couldn't go back and reshoot a single one of them, because the subject was never really the place.
It was the moment passing through it.
Which is exactly why I love them.
I should be honest about how these images happen, though.
I have friends who genuinely love to drive. Long hauls, bad weather, questionable detours, they're into all of it. And I'm forever grateful for that, because it lets me fully commit to my role on these trips.
Being a passenger princess :))
They handle the road. I sit there with my camera in my lap and my eyes out the window, scanning. And when something lines up, it lines up for about three seconds. There's no pulling over, no second lap. I see the shot, grab the camera, pull focus, and take it. One frame. Then it's behind us.
That's the whole game. One shot at something before it's gone.
Half the credit for these frames goes to whoever was holding the wheel.
Here's the part that surprises me most.
Almost everything I'm proud of in my portfolio was planned. Scouted on maps, timed to the minute, sometimes months in advance. That's just how I operate.
These photos are the opposite. Zero planning. Zero expectations. Just looking.
I've started thinking of these drives as a training exercise. If you can find a photograph in the flattest, emptiest stretch of the country, you can find one anywhere. The grand locations hand you a composition. Nowhere makes you earn it.
So yes. The drives through the empty states are boring.
Right up until you actually look.
