Happy Birthday, Blue Mesa

Blue Mesa Blog turns 1 today! The biggest thank you to all my loyal readers. I’d like to raise an imagined glass of your libation of choice to you for all the kind words you’ve shared this year.

In exchange, I’d like the share a few words by Edward Abbey that have always served as something of a guiding evocation for my travels…

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, 
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. 
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, 
May your rivers flow without end, 
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, 
past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest 
where tigers belch and monkeys howl, 
through miasmal and mysterious swamps 
and down into a desert of red rock, 
blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, 
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm 
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, 
where deer walk across the white sand beaches, 
where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, 
where something more beautiful and more full of wonder 
than your deepest dreams waits for you – 
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

— A Prayer for the Traveler