It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for. Out train and car windows, in my imagination, and on my walks through more complicated terrain, flat expanses would call to me, promising walking as I imagined it. And now I had arrived at the pure plane of a dry lake bed where I could walk uninterrupted and utterly free. The desert holds many of these dry lake beds or playas, washed long ago or annually to a surface as flat and inviting as a dance floor when dry. These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavour, like in the blues.

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for. Out train and car windows, in my imagination, and on my walks through more complicated terrain, flat expanses would call to me, promising walking as I imagined it. And now I had arrived at the pure plane of a dry lake bed where I could walk uninterrupted and utterly free. The desert holds many of these dry lake beds or playas, washed long ago or annually to a surface as flat and inviting as a dance floor when dry. These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavour, like in the blues.

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust