The beautiful San Juan mountains are just astonishing, and on a calm morning, seeing these colors reflected in still waters was a kind of eye candy that only out of the perfection of nature can such a scene be realized.

Funny how just as quickly as we reach our ultimate destination, we are already heading back the other way, not that it won’t be loaded with detours such as this particular view along the Million Dollar Highway in southwest Colorado.

Beaver dams are incredible works of engineering that blow my mind that a furry little 40-pound semi-aquatic mammal can construct a dam that holds back so much water and radically alters our landscape building new ecosystems along the way. It’s truly a shame that we hunted them nearly to extinction in Europe and carelessly took all we wanted here in America for fashion when beaver pelt hats were all the rage. I’m yet to see one of these elusive animals in the wild, but it’s not for lack of trying.

As gorgeous as the landscape is, I can’t help but ponder how people of European descent got to claim these lush lands while the original Native American settlers of North America have been pushed to the most inhospitable lands the country has to offer. While I love the sights of the Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservations, they are very arid places that make everything about living there difficult.

We are back in New Mexico, passing through Shiprock, named after this inselberg or monadnock in the distance. A monadnock is an isolated rock hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or virtually level surrounding plain. To the Navajo, it is known as Tsé Bitʼaʼí, meaning “rock with wings” or “winged rock,” and is a sacred site.

These landscapes carve out a place in our senses as deep as they stand out in our vision. Our good fortune of being able to place ourselves in such dramatically beautiful locations is a bit of luck that it seems many cannot appreciate. I can only say this due to how many times we are asked how we endure the monotony of the open road, as though sights like this don’t leave indelible impressions.