My Summer Home

(Timothy Egan) ... With my friend Tim Williams, I stuck my thumb out on a freeway toward the Rockies, east from our West; two Tims on the road. We saw mountain ranges in Montana named Beartooth and Big Horn, and rivers honoring presidents Madison and Jefferson. We traveled over one road labeled Going-to-the-Sun, and heard whispered stories about another heading toward Craters of the Moon. ... The immensity often gets lost in the superlatives stirred up by the most outrageously scenic sites. But in the aggregate, this is what every citizen owns: 530 million acres, of which 193 million are run by the Forest Service, 253 million by the Bureau of Land Management and 84 million by the National Park Service. The public land endowment is more than three times the size of France. Continued

Image: WPA/LoC