Welcome to the Crooked Trail! To begin with, this blog will document a 10 week journey from Portland, OR through the Southwestern U.S., culminating with the total solar eclipse on April 8th in Wimberley, Texas. We’ll take roughly one month getting there and another month getting back. We depart 2/29/24 and return 5/11/24.

We are lucky enough to have jobs that allow us to work remotely and with the miracle of Starlink, we can work from the most remote locations. We’ll be taking it slow staying in one location for a week or more while we work and explore. My winter project has been building out the bed of our 2015 F-150 with a Go Fast Camper for full time living and working. I’ll do a future post on the build.

We’re keeping the itinerary somewhat loose, but our first stop is Escondido, CA and then Joshua Tree for our first week of work. Other places we’ll be spending time are Anza Borrego, KOFA Wildlife Refuge, Tuscon area, Big Bend, Southeastern New Mexico, and Southern Utah.

We have our house sitter lined up and the truck packed. Let the adventure begin!

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

Edward Abbey