Road Photo of the Day: Vanishing Point (part 1)

There is something uniquely American about scenes like this. You find them all over the West. A ribbon of asphalt, two lanes, running like an arrow for the horizon across barren, unpopulated country. Never varying from a plumb line in the horizontal, but undulating freely over the varying vertical terrain. From the Great Plains through the Rockies and Great Basin, to the Sierras and Cascades you’ll encounter this phenomenon. I never saw anything like it in anywhere Europe, and I’ve never seen anything like it east of the Mississippi river either.

I imagine you see nothing but this in parts of Australia, but I haven’t been there… yet.

As the vast majority of my lifetime as a license carrying adult has been spent within a day’s drive of the Continental Divide I’ve spent a lot of time looking through windshields at this sort of horizon. Driving this sort of road. To me it is like being home. As comforting as my driveway.

I’ll never forget running the Cannonball Classic almost ten years ago. We barreled west from New York and the route took us through Colorado and Utah to US 50, aka “The Loneliest Road”. Leaving I-15 in Utah US 50 makes a couple of cursory turns and then settles into a straightaway that I swear goes on for 100 miles. Of course it crests a hill at one point and you see the road going straight over the distant horizon. There were 4 British journalists stuffed into a Subaru WRX covering the event and I had just returned from the UK about a year before. I remember thinking how absolutely mind-blowing experiencing this must be for them.

Picture yourself out there. Go ahead, floor it… nobody will ever know.