At the foothills of the San Gorgonio mountain range lies the Malaki Museum, a sanctuary of culture and history that celebrates the Cahuilla people. My recent visit to this museum was more than an educational outing; it was a revelation. Walking through their garden, guided by an expert who explained the medicinal properties of many of the native plants, I couldn’t help but reflect on a troubling irony: The Western world’s dismissal of natural remedies while profiting immensely from them.

The wilderness has always been a place where humans confront their identity—both as part of nature and as its most disruptive force. During a recent wilderness training, my instructor presented a provocative hypothetical: Should we remove invasive plants from the wilderness, even if it means interfering with the natural landscape? What if leaving them untouched leads to the extinction of the Joshua tree?

Living in the desert teaches you to see beauty in subtle hues, but Oak Glen Preserve defied my expectations with a brilliant display of fall colors—leaves ablaze in oranges, reds and yellows. It was a visual feast that stood in stark contrast to the muted tones of my home in Joshua Tree, and I couldn’t help but marvel at this unexpected transformation so close to home. As a photographer, I was captivated by the vibrant leaves and shifting light, each moment offering a fleeting glimpse of nature’s dynamic artistry.

The desert has a way of making you feel small. Not in a diminishing sense, but in the way a cathedral might—vast, timeless and humbling. From my home in Joshua Tree, the arid landscape feels infinite, as though it exists on a different scale of time. Death Valley National Park, with its extremes of heat, height and desolation, amplifies that feeling. It’s a place where the ancient past, immediate present and an imagined future coexist, written into the folds of its canyons and the rusted edges of its mining relics.

There’s a kind of freedom that only the open road can offer. It’s not just the sense of motion, of distance ticking away beneath your tires, but the feeling of slipping into a world untethered by schedules. For twelve days in late August, I left behind the Mojave Desert’s relentless heat and journeyed north to the cool embrace of the Pacific Northwest. Miles of open highway unfurled before me, a path that wound through quiet logging towns, iconic national parks, bustling cities, and back again. Along the way, the rhythm of the road became a meditation, and the landscape shifted from arid desert to lush, rain-soaked greens. What began as a trip through familiar terrain transformed into a deeper exploration—of the places I had come to know, and of the enduring connection I have to the open road itself.