44h 41m (2,635 mi) via Alaska Hwy—Part 1, USA
The interstate goes—
America’s alphabet.
Speed limit: eighty.
The farther we drive from Denver, the more the land opens. Southern Wyoming is so flat it seems to fold back on itself, like a section-sewn hardcover spread open on a table, flexing without breaking its spine. I-25 pursues broad pages of plateau, its gutters stitched with cattle gates and fence lines binding enormous ranches together like exposed thread.
Mile by mile, the truck keeps going, waiting for the story to write itself.
The Wolf flew in from New York to be my copilot on the long, lonely drive north to Alaska. Nearly seventy-eight now, he still wears his guide hat with a hawk feather tucked into the band and is remarkably spritely for someone who stepped off a dawn flight and straight into eight hours in the cab.
He rides shotgun peeling a clementine in one long spiral. Outside, the land opens wider and wider until it can hold almost anything. Memory rushes in to fill it. Herter’s catalogs. Roadside taxidermy. The old American West still flickering at the edges.
He was raised on its iconography in a way I never was. To him, the mesas and antelope are not symbols but returns to a place he’s never been. But his father came here in the 1950s, when the Wolf was a little boy, and shot an elk. He recalls:
Elk head on stone wall—
we bragged to the city kids
about the Wild West.
The wind wakes up and presses against the truck. I watch the fuel gauge sink as we climb hill after hill. It feels like Wyoming is trying to push us back toward Colorado.
Jackalopes linger
on the flat backs of mesas—
taunting the highway.
“They open the Strait, then close it. Open and closed,” the Wolf sighs after we top off at $4.39 a gallon. “They need to just make up their mind.”
There’s the book folding back on itself again.
The sunsets in Montana are so violently colorful they bruise the sky. Neon bands stack along the horizon like pancakes on a griddle. The truck follows the light slightly west, though for two days we have been driving almost exactly due north.
Northern light lengthens—
a compass pointing in twilight
up the latitudes.
The Wolf talks while I drive, though he still leans forward at every vibration in the truck. He thinks something is wrong with the new shocks and pulls up YouTube videos comparing suspension noises, holding the phone close to his face beneath the brim of his hat. I take his criticism personally, as if the truck were something I built myself.
In third grade we drew buffalo and talked about how magnificent it must have been to see them roaming the plains that had become our playgrounds.
Manifest Destiny—
taught like the dinosaur’s end:
violent, natural.
“The white men arrived in ignorance,” they told us, “like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.”
“Huge and clumsy, yes, but ultimately a force of nature: inevitable, impersonal, beyond today’s judgement.”
Little Bighorn wind,
Custer dissolves into sage—
myths riot in dust.
We pass a sign for Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Wolf jolts upright, startling Sasha who’s claimed him as her cushion.
“Can we stop? I didn’t realize we’d pass this way...”
He feels about Old Westerns the way I feel about skiing in Banff. Along this endless route, we each have our private sites of pilgrimage.
It is off-season, midweek, after hours. Still, a field is a field, and many people died in this one. That makes it the kind of museum whose exhibits reveal themselves like a wound that never fully closes.
The park gates are shut, so we pull into the gravel lot of the Custer Battlefield Trading Post, where rows of white tipis rise beside the interstate. Across the road lies the battlefield itself: craggy bluffs and dissected uplands folding toward the Little Bighorn River. Here, in June 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces defeated the 7th Cavalry.
The story still hangs over the West like a billboard advertising unfinished history. One version survives in trading posts and roadside museums, in Marlboro ads and old books written in heroic tones: doomed cavalrymen making a noble last stand against impossible odds.
But the land remembers differently.
The battle was part of a larger war over expansion, broken treaties, and the seizure of Indigenous land. What became mythologized as “Custer’s Last Stand” was also a decisive Indigenous victory against an advancing empire.
We climb from the truck and wander the closed property. Behind the gift shop, beside racks of toy tomahawks and Custer keychains, sits a mound of buffalo skulls whitening in the sun, their hollow triangles echoing the tipis nearby. Sasha sniffs at the pile of bones and reaches for a horn with her teeth. I pull her away.
The last light clings to the ridge while headlights drift along the interstate below like ghosts moving through the basin. As in places like Gettysburg, after the battles come the highways: shipping lanes, frontage roads, housing developments. The traditional American habit of building forward over the dead.
In the morning, we push on from Billings. This last stretch of America is a land of long trains sliding beneath denim skies.
Road without ending—
belief flattens into miles
beneath prairie sky.
White crosses sprout beside the highway like weeds. The Wolf has figured out how to get Starlink running on his laptop. The bones of the Battle of the Little Bighorn are behind us now, and he seems satisfied he has seen all the Montana he needs to see.
But there are older graves here.
Last year, a rancher near Hell Creek uncovered what may prove to be the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, its teeth nearly fifteen inches long. Leviathans layered beneath leviathans. Cavalry beneath interstate. Dinosaur beneath cavalry. The land keeps burying and revealing itself in turns.
Tyrants under ranch—
Each age leaves its skeleton
inside the next one.
The farther we get from cities, the better the baked goods become.
Boarded-up towns with Main Streets wide enough for wagons reveal local bakeries like pearls tucked inside rough shells. Cinnamon rolls beneath flickering neon. Out here, sweetness survives where almost nothing else does.
Long skirts, lemon steam.
Better than downtown cafés
beside diesel pumps.
We continue north toward the Sweetgrass Port of Entry, where Interstate 15 becomes Alberta Highway 4. The truck rolls forward in silence. We pass the Duty Free shop—with its decent liquor prices and fluctuating hours—without stopping. For now, we have had enough of American history.