Postcards From the West
In their Postcards From the West series, writer Christopher Reynolds and photographer Mark Boster search for new angles and forgotten history among some of the most iconic views in the American West. (Click here to see a map of all locations.)
- 1
Most days, in most ways, this park’s Upper Geyser Basin is a geothermal outlaw biker beach party — belching and splashing at all hours, with a sulfuric whiff of menace riding the breeze.
- 2
The California border was just behind us, and Times photographer Mark Boster and I were roaring up a rain-soaked Oregon highway past fog-shrouded forests and green-stubbled boulders.
- 3
They were just a couple of greenhorns from Pittsburgh, but the Kolb brothers knew the greatest photo op in the West when they saw it.
- 4
It took me several trips here to realize this, but if you know where to look and time it right, Death Valley is one giggle after another.
- 5
The most famous building in Texas is smaller than you expect, and it’s about as pretty as your average California mission.
- 6
Somehow, on four visits to Pike Place Market over three decades, I failed to learn where the brothel was.
- 7
In the Alaska of my mind, it is always summer.
- 8
Durango has hosted miners, Louis L’Amour, outdoor enthusiasts and Hollywood crews. It’s also home to the historic Denver & Rio Grande Railway, which offers breathtaking trips to nearby Silverton.
- 9
It was the first full day of my redwood country road trip, about 180 miles north of San Francisco.
- 10
The north coast of Kauai is a place of spiky green ridges and plunging waterfalls. In low-key Hanalei, nature beckons this visitor despite Princeville resort traffic and a patch of iffy weather.
- 11
L.A.’s Union Station, the ‘last of the great train stations’ has been moving people and freight for more than seven decades.
- 12
The venerable San Diego Zoo invites long and repeated visits. There are, after all, more than 3,700 animals to get to know. Plus, the Australian Outback area was just updated.
- 13
Commanding buttes and mesas plus a complicated history mark the spectacular Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.
- 14
The revitalized theater, with its electrified-ersatz-Islamic-hallucination exterior, is a focal point of the Hawthorne area. With hippies and hipsters, it’s all very ‘Portlandia.’
- 15
The expensive and outdated mode of transportation remains the heart of San Francisco.
- 16
Half Dome in Yosemite National Park is a California icon, and there’s more than one way to look at it — from the unrounded side, for example.
