#horizonswest

#horizonswest

The frontier myth has proven to be one of the most powerful and enduring stories in American history, erasing or altering the history of people of color and women in the West.

The average elevation across the United States varies significantly, creating a divide between the high-altitude West and the lower-lying East and South, which impacts skiing conditions.

These women artists were in museum collections, but they were barely shown. The challenge was to do enough research to find common themes and bring them together.

Bryce Canyon National Park is home to the world's largest concentration of hoodoos, making hiking here feel like you're on another planet. I recommend hiking around the rim to take in the vastness of the spires.

For 2025, there was good news and bad news: overall, these areas were visited 323 million times over the course of the year. That's the good news; the bad news is that this figure was down ever so slightly - specifically, 2.7% - from a record-setting 2024.

But after decades of outsourcing tungsten production, the federal government has now begun restricting imports. United States Tungsten founders Stacy Hastie and Randy Waterfield saw this coming. They're reviving what was once America's largest tungsten mine, the Tungsten Queen. It's a site holding an estimated 1 million tons of tungsten with an in-ground value approaching $450 million, the company says. And it says it is already in talks with the U.S. Government.

By midwinter, Los Angeles is defined less by cold than by light. Cool, clear mornings give way to afternoons shaped by the low winter arc of the sun, painting the mountains in long shadows and the sky in improbable color. And as that low light settles in, my whole body shifts in spirit. Somewhere deep in the limbic system, a synapse fires like a flare, tracing the old circuitry of migration and memory - that annual pull toward the wide-open deserts of the American Southwest.

Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody - the gang of American frontiersmen is all here in The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West. The valuable new volume is by historian Paul Andrew Hutton, an award-winning author, documentary writer, and a Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. Hutton's 565-page history, a New York Times bestseller published last year by Dutton, covers the American frontier from the mid-18th century to 1900.

Standing beneath a tangled canopy of highway overpasses at the edge of a muddy bluff, I watched the Missouri River churn below me. Its murky water rolled relentlessly onward, folding into eddies as it wound its way toward the Mississippi. Hundreds of years ago, this treacherous brown ribbon marked the frontier's edge; it was where the West got wild. Of course, I knew

When the weather warms up and the late winter rains turn trees green and fields into wildflower wonderlands, it's the perfect time to take a drive. Whether your preferred landscape is mountains, deserts, forests, plains, or coastal views, there's a spring road trip in the United States for you. Explore historic sites, regional food, wineries, or nature-all from the front seat.

It's hard to separate the impact and the legacy of the railroad from the United States itself. According to the Association of American Railroads, there are over 140,000 miles of track in the U.S.-the most extensive rail network of any country in the world. But there's one passenger train route that outshines the rest in both scope and beauty: the California Zephyr.

AllTrails, a hiking app with trail maps and reviews, dug into insights from their 90 million-plus members and team of trail experts to spotlight lesser-known places where the trail alone is worth planning a trip around. Their guide, Travel-Worthy Trails for 2026, spotlights eight unexpected destinations around the world where the trail is the destination.