(Earlier posts on the Pioneers project: I, II, III, IV, V) Keen eyes will notice that the above map, from a 4 a.m. planning session at the Wendover Motel 6, covers Nevada, our 36th state and home to my newest trip for the Pioneers! O Pioneers! project. I was sent to Vegas last week to shoot a feature story for a great new client and was able to tack on an extra week to tackle the Silver State (though I photographed a lot more gold activity both current and civil war-era). Tackle is really the right word... NV is damn large, the 7th largest actually, and I covered more than 1500 miles of it's circumference over the last few days. What I found - I had never been outside of Vegas, the Hoover dam, and the interstates leading to/from the Grand Circle loop - is a beautiful and beautifully empty state (2/3rds lives in the Vegas metro area) with a lot of elevation, sand, and wind, a lot of history, natural beauty, and some weird bits, all of which is basically right in line with my project. Similar to the feeling of leaving NYC to go anywhere and change pace, leaving the Vegas strip is also a great escape... and Monday morning I was up early heading north, gaining elevation, and headed through the Great Basin all the way up to the NE corner of the state. Along the way I was pulled over for speeding (god love these tiny towns who run the speed limit, on a 7% grade coming down a mountain, from 70mph to 25mph over the course of a 1/4 mile), narrowly missed a snow storm, and ran into a natural wonder to rival Utah's best (Cathedral Gorge is an insanely pretty place and should be a part of NPS). For whatever reason, maybe because I stayed away from the tables the previous week, this third trip had luck... the afore-mentioned cop only gave me a warning (I was doing +12) and was a photography buff who was happy to chat and had suggestions. Beautiful and private property was always empty or relatively easy to access with something I could easily climb to get some height. The sky seemed to always clear (or a cloud suddenly blunt the midday sun) at opportune times. South of Reno I drove on maybe the most ridiculously fun public road I've ever experienced (I've driven A LOT) in US-120 going east of Mono Lake. At times, as I found my cheap lodging well after dark, the following day's plan looked almost blank but somewhere/how I would run smack into a really juicy spot by just getting on the road early and trucking on, and through that the momentum stayed by my side, keeping the more natural long road trip companions of self-doubt and loathing in the back seat. Whether or not the photographs will tease this luck further out remains to be seen of course, but I shot nearly all of my allotted film so there is a gitty in my up heading back to NYC. In general though the project is starting to form into a solid shape with specific themes: The west is big, the west is empty, nature is powerful and un-tameable, the west is useful, tourism shapes the west in strange ways, RV parks are bizarrely gravitating, the western cities are sprawling in mockery of the natural beauty steps beyond it's vague borders, the west is America, the west is freedom, the west is... Likely each successive trip will be better than the last because I'll be that much better at finding pieces which fit together and getting closer to a body of work that hangs together. As much as I love driving and exploring the world, I want to be building something real with this project, something that has weight and scale. In Nevada I tried to find some evidence of what the modern California emigrant trail looks like but it just didn't feel right; a river without context is just a river. Likely I'll be moving away from specifically shooting the places of the past unless they have a context and grounding in present-day. Pioneers is not supposed to be a history lesson, even if the process of shooting researching this project has been profoundly educational and inspiring to me. On a red-eye flight home tonight. Excited to get back to it and return some of this energy into my other personal projects located a whole lot closer to home and life as normal. I'm also supremely happy to be returning the rental and going back to my car-free citified-life; gas is crazy expensive (2 days ago in the middle of nowhere I was forced to buy $4.99/gal regular).