Getting the flavor of...Texas’s road to nowhere

Texas’s road to nowhere

In Texas, a truly great drive should be “as free from traffic as possible,” said Joe Nick Patoski in Texas Monthly. Put me behind the wheel and there’s no place I’d rather roam than an 85-mile stretch of highway that starts a bit west of Ozona in “one of the emptiest—and most scenic—parts of the state.” From Interstate 10, I take State Highway 290 toward Sheffield and watch the hills “morph into mesas and small mountains.” Nine miles later, I arrive at “the literal edge of the old frontier”—a “cactus-studded” overlook that presented a steep challenge to 19th-century stagecoaches. About 11 miles of Highway 349 then brings me to Ranch Road 2400 and its 39 miles of vast desert landscape—“no buildings, no billboards, no trace of humanity.” You could choose Sanderson, “a charmingly ancient railroad town,” as a sort of destination. But where you stop doesn’t really matter: “You’re already Somewhere Else.”

South Dakota’s buffalo show

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On one day every September, more than 14,000 people in South Dakota “time-travel to the Old West,” said Connie Nelson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. For 46 years, Custer State Park’s annual Buffalo Roundup has helped thin the park’s bison population, because the local grasslands can’t support more than 1,000 head. Last fall, my husband and I were there to catch the spectacle. Rising before dawn in our camper, we arrived at a viewing site while it was still dark and mingled with the crowd until the crack of a whip drew everyone’s attention to the hills. “Dark, bulky shapes appeared on the top of the ridge”—slowly at first, until the numbers grew and they “floated down the hills like the shadows from a cloud.” Riders drove them down as the enthralled crowd watched—at one point, the buffalo “were close enough that I could see their heaving sides.” For a few moments, we stood amid “deafening, thrilling chaos.”