By Jack Smith

“The desert is a lot like beer; it’s an acquired taste.” That’s what a friend of mine told me some years ago. I think he may have been onto something. However, these northern cold desert areas of Wyoming are neither a smooth lager nor an easy-drinking American pilsner. Rather, I seem to be continually thinking of a bitter pale ale as I sit on the cracked gray clay sipping warm water from my water bottle. It is a hot day in early June and I am in the middle of the Honeycombs wildlands in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Although I am only 20 miles from the city of Worland, I feel I could be a thousand miles or a hundred and fifty years away from any western population center.

By Jeri Lewis Edwards

How could you have known we would
become utterly, inexplicably lost
without that misplaced map?

And that razor cut trail cloaked in dust,
talus, edged felsite, gneissic-banded rubble.
We witnessed those tumbled stones—
they weren’t cairns from your past,
no markers to guide us.