The first thing I did last year was run.

I found myself on the eve of the new year lying restlessly on the floor of my apartment (on this great Mashhad rug from like 1937 which is ornate and beautiful, and for which I negotiated a blood-curdlingly screaming deal on a few years back, but which of course has nothing to do with this story). Most of my friends were taking the year off hosting; I didn’t want to go out for the evening and sit in cold traffic around Denver to cheers with strangers, and I would be damned if I’d start my grand adventurous year with a story of staying home.

So I grabbed the keys.

A quick maps search showed if I left my house at 10pm, I could arrive at the foot of the Rocky Mountain Grand Tetons range, at an old beautiful building called Moulton Barn, exactly at sunrise. I’d spend the dawn of the year on an adventure, watching the furious red of the first sun of 2025 summit the peaks, while I drank hot coffee and The Rest Of My Life began.

I put on a hoodie and a light leather jacket (Vegan, thanks for asking, and yes I am thanks for asking), somehow completely certain that the weather — at the beginning of January in rural Wyoming — would be warm enough for such an outfit, and I hopped in the car at 10pm. The moment I was free of the tangled interstate interchanges of Denver, the roads were completely clear, just me and the ever-present solemn semi-trucks. I could not believe my luck, and did not for a single moment consider that perhaps there was some great and obvious reason why no one else had decided to drive to the Western wilderness at 10pm on New Year’s Eve. I crossed the border out of Colorado at about 11:30 with a face so smug it would’ve gotten me convicted of crimes I was completely innocent of.

Google Maps had offered a scenic route, which when plotting my adventure at 3pm I included without a second thought — Well, let’s see about it, I mused. What wonders will I be privy to on the road less traveled? Surely this will make all the difference.

I had my second thought now, 30 miles into a wily and curving B-road, that perhaps sunlight would’ve improved the actual scenic qualities of the route some. I drove through countless towns in the pitch dark, towns with charming names like Virginia Dale and Tie Siding. I did not see a single one of them.

My first gas stop was at a truck station shortly after the Wyoming border, somewhere near Laramie. I picked up a little snack and an energy drink — I had never had a Red Bull before but I’ve seen what it does to some of you freaks, and that suited me fine for an overnight drive in freezing dark. I fueled the car while regarding the row of 30 semi cabs, which shivered from their idling engines and squinted suspiciously at me with glaring headlights from across the parking lot. I doffed my hat politely at the assembly and resumed.

At around 2:30 in the morning, after many hours of wide-eyed abyssal staring along Highway 287 and then I-80, and then 287 again, and after many hours of an audiobook recording of Wuthering Heights narrated by someone who had only had a Northern accent ever loosely described to them, I hit a wall. I felt like my neck would fall off my shoulders at the sheer weight of my gigantic head, which I had somehow only now become aware of. I parked the car to nap — I did plan for this eventuality, and did quite sensibly have a paper-thin blanket folded at-the-ready in the passenger seat.

It is here I should mention my car is a 30-year-old rear-wheel-drive German car, and the part that is important is that it is 30 years old. I woke with a phone alarm to a very, very cold car, which I had parked with the engine off on the side of a highway in 0ºF weather (or -18ºC, had this story taken place outside of the United States), to let cool for half an hour. I restarted the engine to get back on the road, and a while after pulling back off the shoulder, I realized, with my honed shrewdness and near superhuman situational awareness, that it wasn’t getting any warmer. Bleary-eyed and with hands gone completely white from the cold, I turned to the fourth wall with an infuriating “it’s a living” sort of expression. I donned gloves and wrapped the blanket tightly around my waist and legs, and quite idiotically quite bravely persisted.

It is here I should mention again that my car is a 30-year-old rear-wheel-drive German car, and the part that is important here is that it is rear-wheel-drive. And before you start looking at me like my mom looks at me when she’s reminded of that: People overreact to road conditions and overestimate the utility of all-wheel drive. Tires are more important for traction in inclement weather than drive ever will be, and besides, all-wheel drive does nothing for you when you’re trying to stop. With proper tires, my rear-wheel-drive and a single ounce of common sense has gotten me through frankly surprisingly dramatic weather conditions many a time.

Or at least, that was my heavy cope solemn mantra as the elevation increased towards the continental divide. The mantra, I must admit, grew quite insistent, as the clear but cold roads became lightly-snowpacked roads, and then became heavily-snowpacked roads, and then become a 3" snow track. At exactly the peak of the ascent, the snow on the roads grew to closer to 5 or 6 inches (or 15cm, had the snow fallen on roads outside of the United States), me and the car decided to completely renegotiate our relationship. Until now, I had been confidently commanding it a few degrees left, a few degrees right — whatever the road-going voyage asked of us. But now, a few hours before dawn, we decided together to explore the idea that perhaps the steering wheel was, perhaps, more for suggestions than outright demands. For instance, in this new arrangement, I would not be turning left so much as suggesting we go left, and then when my suggestions were rebutted, I would be slowing the car to 15mph (24km/h, had the slowing etc etc), and then 10mph, and often even 5mph, until my suggestion was taken a bit more seriously.

The two of us went on like this for the next many miles, from Dubois down into the approach to the Grand Teton gates. As the elevation decreased, the snow subsided, and the car let me take over most of the steering again. Rather inequitably, the car did not use its newfound free time and focus to go about fixing the heater issue.

It was still very dark, but the growing blue saturation of the sky told me dawn was approaching (the LCD clock on the dashboard also told me, but mostly the blue told me. I am by nature very in tune with the different levels of blue in the sky at different times of night and that should be noted). I entered the park, turned down the road to get to Moulton, and the smug expression came back with a vengeance. I had done it! Oh, what fools all my peers back in their comfy homes must feel — I was a great champion, of the road, and of the elements. I was starting the New Year on a proper adventure, facing down countless odds to watch the sun rise against one of the American West’s greatest views. I became so engrossed with regaling myself, preening over my own glorious victory, that I almost did not react in time for the road abruptly ending.

As it turns out, most of Grand Teton National Park shuts down between November and April. As it further turns out, that includes the discontinuation of maintenance for many of the roads. So here, 2.5 miles from my destination, instead of a red carpet and crowd of wild animals assembled to cheer my arrival, I faced an 8ft snowbank, which completely blocked the path to the barn.

I blinked dumbly at the wall before me for at least 11 minutes, before furrowing my brow and stepping out of the car. I entertained very briefly the idea of scrambling over the snowbank and hiking the remaining miles to the barn, but that idea was extinguished when my first step onto the snowbank became my first step in to the snowbank, and I realized I’d have to try something else.

I elected to drive over to Jenny Lake, a popular destination that I expected would still be plowed. It would be much closer to the mountains, but in my current circumstances I was happy to see what there was to see.

Back in the car and heading back down Gros Ventre Road the way I came, it started to become clear that “what there was to see” was also a rapidly-narrowing margin. It was now 7:30 in the morning, and the sun was just starting to illuminate the landscape, though it remained beyond the horizon. As if in a silly tablecloth magic trick, the dawn of January 1st, after a perfectly clear night, exchanged the impenetrable cover of darkness for an even more impenetrable cover of blizzard.

I had driven 9 and a half hours into the wilderness of Wyoming to look at a snow fog so thick I couldn’t see the shoulder on the other side of the road.

I went back to blinking dumbly, this time for a longer increment, to really savor the dumbness of the blinks, the sheer idiotic heft of the eyelids, the stupid clapping noise they made. Once I had blinked to my satisfaction, I started up the car, again, and pointed it dejectedly in the direction of the nearest town, Jackson, where I parked at one of the many visitor centers, and fell instantly to sleep.

Ninety minutes’ rest hardly refreshed my weary and frozen bones. I got up to go snag a parks sticker from inside the center, to find by rattling helplessly on its front doors, that it was one of the many visitors centers that closes in that six month window from November into Spring. I went and sat fully on my ass in the snowy parking lot, and blinked some more.

There’s a delightful little bakery & restaurant in Jackson called The Bunnery, where they’ll serve you oatmeal with berries, and a cup of coffee so bad you’ll worry you offended someone on the way in. I know this because I went there and I had both of these things, and I tipped very well as a profuse apology for however I had scorned the waiter.

Back in the car, I reviewed my options. Park: closed, trails: unmaintained, snowshoes: not owned, sunrise: unwitnessed. As the LCD screen ticked up to 10 am, I turned the ignition for the last time, and started driving home.

The daylight drive of return was beautiful. A couple of stressful moments where the blizzard raged its hardest, but mostly it was peace. Snaking patterns of drift over the asphalt, volumetric beams intermittently reaching the road like the sideways glances of god, an ice-covered river caught halfway between polar blue and seafoam green in the rare bright light that filtered down through the storm. Once I was out of the Rockies again and onto the plains, the storm cleared, and in that great, yawning, too-big Wyoming sky I saw the first morning of the year. I kept the stereo silent, and I drove with a steady foot. I felt my manic energy of the night before (and if I may be candid with you, now that I consider us old friends, from the months before) — melt away from me as the snow slipped off the roof and hood of the car.