From the editor

“For many Americans, the open road best captures the essential character of the West—unfinished, open-ended, a marriage of the human psyche with the earth, sky, and highway.” —William Wyckoff, Geographer

We’ve all been there, driving fast on a ribbon of asphalt, watching a distant thunderhead boil up, counting raptors on fenceposts, cresting a long geologic uplift only to have the last FM station flicker to static. These roads of the West mean everything to us, linking our scattered towns and cities with the most remote ranches and energy fields, carrying goods and newspapers, food and medicine, letters and visitors. We need our roads. We take our roads for granted, forgetting how extensively they shape our existence. And we curse our roads when they are clogged with construction or sheathed in deadly ice.

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