The story
Out to the south now, watch those ridges start to rise, eroded and bare and the color of old paper, ribbed like something the rain has been carving for ten thousand years. That's the badlands beginning, mudstone hills worn into a maze where almost nothing grows. There's a deep-time feel out this way, a sense that the land is keeping a much older calendar than ours. Ahead of you, when the haze thins, the Salton Sea throws back a low metallic shimmer. Vast, quiet, sun-struck country. The kind of emptiness the desert is actually for.
