INTRODUCTION
In March of 2023, a friend and I set out on a truly epic week of exploration in the Southwestern United States. Instead of using our week to see just one or even a few destinations, we turned up the pace and explored nine distinct locations. Of course, travel isn’t about the numbers, but we decided to do this after trying to plan a few different longer-term backpacking trips, each of them failing to fully realize the potential of a full week off of work, coming short of the truly grand feeling we were after. And because these sort of trips open up more of the map, so to speak. You become familiar with many different locations and how to get around them, making them more mentally accessible and easier to further explore in the future. This series of adventures would see us hiking one of the Grand Canyon’s most aggressive trails, visiting a photographic hotspot just off a major highway, exploring Zion National Park on foot in the rain, spending a couple days rejuvenating in Las Vegas, seeing the best of Death Valley National Park, exploring Los Angeles for the first time and hiking to one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world, and embarking on what I think is the best day hike in Joshua Tree National Park. Along with me to help me tell these stories was my newly purchased Fujifilm XT30 II, which I thought would be fantastic for such fast-paced travel due to its compact form factor and lightness.
