I'm just putting this image here, so that in two months' time — when my Arizona blood is quailing at the thought of a Utah winter, when I wrack my brain for any possible reason why I have not moved from this barren tundra of winter waste during the warmer months, when I despair at the thought of another six months of snow-slicked roads, clenched muscles and gritted teeth — I will look at this and say to myself: this is why you stay, year in and year out.

This is the soil and the sky of the summer months that perennially make of me a palimpsest, scraping clear the winter wrath and ruin, and lulling me into another season of warm and hazy air writ large beneath our eternal mountains.