I figured I'd spare y'all from more of my pontificating for a bit so I dug through some of my older photos instead. A few years back I drove down Highway 101 from where it starts in Washington to Florence, Oregon. This first photo is from that adventure, it's from somewhere just south of the Cape Meares Lighthouse in Oregon. For some reason this spot just caught my eye and I had to stop and explore a bit. It looked to be primarily a spot for hunting shellfish but I feel like it made for a good spot to hunt photos too. I didn't realize it until I was zooming in on it in photoshop but the bird in the photo appears to have some sort of shell in its beak.
Taking the 101 through the Pacific Northwest is a lovely little jaunt but I eventually got to pining for some dry, hot days and headed southeast. My last night in Oregon sealed the deal, I attempted to camp in Crater Lake National Park but it snowed enough (4 inches that night) that I said to hell with it and slept in the car (you couldn't even see the lake for all the snow coming down, I was more than a little disappointed).
This second photo is from my search for warm, sunny days. "Deserts are sunny, hot and dry, let's go there" sums up my thinking at the time but I may have miscalculated slightly... I found the desert and it was indeed dry, but I didn't find the sun or the heat until after I'd cut across the better part of two states (Nevada and Utah) and made it to Moab. This photo was taken on Antelope Island in the middle of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. I'd arrived after dark and just thrown my sleeping bag down on the ground beside my car and went to sleep, with no clue what the dawn would show. I awoke the next morning to one of the rudest wake-up calls ever, a bison/buffalo eating noisily a few feet from the foot of my sleeping bag (besides noisy, it was ugly as hell for that early in the morning). I decided to smoke a cigarette in the car while he finished his breakfast and then got my camera and went to see what I could see. This photo was of one of my first good looks at the lake.
This last one I've posted before but it is probably my favorite shot from Antelope Island (I'm not sure why they call it that, I definitely saw more bison than anything else there). While the first photo was looking towards the lake from my campsite this last one is looking uphill from it. It's entirely possible that my early morning visitor is one of the bison in the shot, they just seemed to wander wherever they pleased and take no notice of the people camping.
I don't know what these folks were doing but I got a chuckle when I discovered that Antelope Island had made BBC News last year... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49898709