The Country in Between: Boston to San Francisco by Car

The route

The line follows people as much as places: Margaret's family near Toronto, friends in Fort Collins, and friends again in Walnut Creek, across the bay from San Francisco. Between those fixed points we chose the smaller roads, crossing the Great Lakes country, the Plains, the Rockies, the red-rock Southwest and the basins of Nevada before the last climb over the Sierra Nevada.

William Least Heat-Moon called roads like these blue highways, after the colour old road atlases used for the small routes. His 1982 book of that name is still the best companion for this kind of journey.

New Hampshire: a Tuesday at the Wildcat

We flew into Boston, took a bus into the city and spent our first night downtown. The next morning we collected the car, found our way out of Boston without too much difficulty, stopped at a suburban supermarket for provisions, and headed north.

Our first destination was Jackson, a small village in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Jackson has been drawing visitors since the nineteenth century, when its mountains became popular with artists and with holidaymakers escaping the cities of New England. It still has the air of an old mountain resort, with historic inns and a handsome covered bridge.

We stayed at the Wildcat Inn & Tavern, an old-fashioned country inn on Main Street. And, quite by chance, we had arrived on a Tuesday.

Tuesday night at the Wildcat meant Hoot Night, a long-standing evening of live music from local musicians and whoever else turned up to play. We sat at the bar, ordered lobster for supper and listened.

The music was wonderful.

It was one of those evenings you hope to find when travelling but can never really plan for: a good meal, a welcoming inn, musicians enjoying themselves and a room full of people sharing it. We had barely started, and we had already found somewhere we would happily return to.

Into the clouds on Mount Washington

The following morning, 4 September, we went up Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the north-eastern United States, on the Cog Railway. It has carried passengers up the mountain since 1869 and calls itself the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway: a toothed wheel under the engine grips a rack between the rails and hauls the train up gradients that would defeat an ordinary one. The ride is an attraction in its own right.

Mount Washington is famous for its severe and unpredictable weather. On a clear day the views reach across several states and into Canada.

We did not get a clear day. At the summit it was cold, and the landscape was hidden in cloud, so we did the sensible thing, found the café and had a hot drink. There was something faintly comic about travelling all the way up one of America's famous mountains to discover that the main thing we could see was the weather.

Still, we were glad we had done it. We had no idea that weather would become a rather more serious feature of the journey a few days later.

North into Canada

From the mountain we had a long drive ahead: north-west through Vermont, across the border and on towards Montreal. We saw practically nothing of Montreal itself. What I remember is roadworks, traffic and the effort of finding the highway towards Toronto.

Eventually we joined Ontario's Highway 401, one of Canada's great freight corridors. That evening it seemed to be carrying a large share of the continent's heavy trucks, and I remember feeling pursued by them. For long stretches they bore down on our little rental car, and I would have liked a good deal more space between us. If we ever needed a reminder of why we had chosen the smaller roads, the 401 provided it.

We reached Margaret's brother's home in Markham, on the northern edge of Toronto, late in the evening, and were very pleased to arrive.

The quiet of the Algonquin Highlands

Toronto was familiar territory. We have visited many times to see family, so we spent three or four days catching up with Margaret's brother, her sister and her nieces rather than doing the tourist rounds.

Part of that time took us north into the Algonquin Highlands, to an isolated cottage on Big Brother Lake, near Halls Lake, for a couple of nights. This is Ontario's cottage country: wooded hills, bare rock and lakes beyond counting, laid over the ancient rock of the Canadian Shield. For generations, families from Toronto have escaped here for the summer, often to the same cottage year after year.

Sometimes the pleasure of a journey lies in not going anywhere at all.

What I remember most is the quiet. After the trucks of the 401 and the busy suburbs of Toronto, the contrast was enormous. Surrounded by forest and water, the pace of life changed completely, and it was a welcome chance to stop travelling for a while.

Sometimes the pleasure of a journey lies in not going anywhere at all.

Around Lake Huron and into Michigan

When we set off again, we headed north to Sudbury and then west along the northern shore of Lake Huron, through a quieter, thinly settled Ontario of forest, rocky hills, lakes and small towns. We stayed the night in Sault Ste. Marie.

The next morning we crossed the International Bridge into Michigan. The two Sault Ste. Maries, one Canadian and one American, face each other across the St Marys River, which carries the water of Lake Superior down into Lake Huron, and the Soo Locks lift great lake freighters past its rapids.

It is one thing to see the Great Lakes on a map, and quite another to stand beside one and find no far shore.

Back in the United States, we followed the road west across Michigan's Upper Peninsula. On 9 September we stopped near Naubinway, on the northern shore of Lake Michigan, at a viewing platform in the Hiawatha National Forest, and again a couple of hours further west, near Gladstone, beside the water among the trees. The sky was a wonderful blue, and the lake ran out to a horizon that looked like the sea's.

It is one thing to see the Great Lakes on a map, and quite another to stand beside one and find no far shore.

Wisconsin's Driftless country

We spent that night in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and by the next morning the country was changing again. On Highway 53, in Trempealeau County south of Osseo, we stopped to photograph rolling green farmland, wooded ridges and scattered farmsteads.

This is the Driftless Area. The ice sheets of the last Ice Age flattened much of the Midwest but largely missed this corner, so its older landscape of ridges and deep valleys survived. The result is far more varied country than the flat plains people expect of the Midwest, and it is easily missed by anyone hurrying along the Interstates.

We went on west, deliberately passing south of Minneapolis, and into South Dakota. Our stop for the night was Sioux Falls. The weather was deteriorating, and there were warnings about tornadoes.

A tornado in the night

We checked into our hotel in Sioux Falls on Tuesday 10 September. The weather was rough, but we were indoors and hoped the worst would pass.

Then, late that night, the television burst into life with an emergency warning. We were to take shelter on the lower floors, stay inside and keep away from the windows. Outside, the trees were bending in the wind.

It was frightening. We knew tornadoes were possible, but had no idea where one might be or how close it could come. Severe weather is especially unsettling when you are travelling: the place is unfamiliar, you do not really understand the local risks, and you have little idea what is happening beyond the building you are in. We could only follow the warnings and hope.

The storm passed. In the morning we learned how serious it had been. Three tornadoes had struck the city in the night, with winds estimated at up to 130 mph, damaging homes, businesses and a hospital campus. One had hit the 41st Street shopping corridor, in the same part of the city as our hotel. We had been much closer than we realised. Eight people were hurt, and nobody was killed.

The morning was windswept and wet. Surprisingly, the trees around us were still standing, and the car, which I had worried about, was fine. We were not sure whether flooding or storm damage would block the road west, but we got away.

We had come to America to experience the country. We had not expected quite such a close encounter with its weather.

The Missouri and the Badlands

Later that morning, crossing South Dakota, we came to the Missouri River at Chamberlain. I knew it was one of the great rivers of North America, but knowing something and seeing it are very different things. It was far wider than I had imagined, one more reminder of the scale of the country.

Then came Badlands National Park, and the Badlands were extraordinary: sharply eroded hills, deep gullies, knife-edge ridges and strange towers, banded in grey, cream, yellow and red. The bands are the record of ancient seas, floodplains and grasslands laid down over millions of years, and the rain is still cutting new channels into the soft rock.

There are paths, of course, but this is wild country, and the ground underfoot is all broken rock. Even under an overcast sky it was remarkable. We stopped at the viewpoints, explored a little and took photographs, and I would send anyone crossing South Dakota this way.

That evening we reached Rapid City, our base for two nights in the Black Hills.

One day, three versions of the Black Hills

We spent 12 September in the Black Hills, and only afterwards did we see that the day had a shape we had not planned.

The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 recognised them as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Gold was found in 1874, Deadwood sprang up in 1876, and in 1877 the United States took the hills. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled that they had been taken without just compensation. The Lakota have never accepted the money. In one day we saw three answers to that history, carved, sculpted and performed.

Mount Rushmore

In the morning we visited Mount Rushmore, the faces of four presidents carved into the granite between 1927 and 1941. I had seen so many photographs that I had a very definite picture of what to expect, and that, perhaps, was the problem. The monument seemed smaller than I had imagined, and the place was crowded.

The carving is certainly impressive, especially when you consider the engineering. I am glad we saw it. It just was not the heart of our day.

Crazy Horse

That came in the afternoon, at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The idea came from the Lakota leader Henry Standing Bear, who invited the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve a memorial to Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota leader who resisted the United States' advance into Lakota land. The first blast was in 1948, and the face was finished in 1998. When we visited, the face looked out from the mountain and the rest of the figure was still being worked, with the platforms and machinery in plain view.

We took the bus tour towards the carving. It got us nearer, though not as near as we had hoped, and the scale was still hard to grasp.

What made Crazy Horse so rewarding was everything around the carving. The cultural centre introduced Native American history, art and traditions, and we watched dancers in traditional dress and listened to stories. It was entertaining, fascinating and educational, and it began to show us how much these hills mean to the Lakota.

The memorial has its critics among the Lakota too: some of Crazy Horse's descendants have said the family was never asked. We came away thinking about the competing histories that Rushmore and Crazy Horse stand for, and it was much more than looking at a carving on a mountain.

Deadwood

We ended the day in Deadwood, the gold-rush town in the northern hills, which has kept much of its nineteenth-century look and made an attraction of its lawless past. Its most famous character, Wild Bill Hickok, was shot dead at a poker table here in 1876. Today the town stages that history for visitors, and we watched a theatrical saloon fight.

It was good fun, and after the thought-provoking afternoon, we enjoyed the mythology of the frontier with the reassuring knowledge that the gunfight was being performed for our entertainment.

Colorado with friends

From Rapid City we drove south towards Fort Collins, where friends were expecting us for the weekend. We were keen to see them, so we did not wander off the route, and we joined Interstate 25 for the run into Colorado. After the long drives, the tornado and the sightseeing, it was good to be with people we knew and leave the car alone for a while.

Fort Collins sits at the foot of the Rockies, north of Denver: a university city with a lively centre, a strong cycling culture and a particular enthusiasm for craft beer. Our friends showed us both.

Lakes beneath Hallett Peak

One day we drove into Rocky Mountain National Park. Early in the morning, in a meadow beneath a lone pine, a bull elk with a substantial set of antlers was grazing; September is the start of the rut, when the males are at their most active.

Our first walk was at Sprague Lake, and it was a glorious day. The sky was blue, the cliffs of Hallett Peak still held patches of snow, and their reflections lay across the water. Two or three people stood in the lake, fly-fishing, and against the mountains behind them they looked almost insignificant.

Later we went higher, walking through pine forest and past mountain streams around Bear Lake, under the same peaks. After so many hours in the car, it was wonderful to be walking somewhere so magnificent.

Bicycles and beer

The next day we swapped walking boots for bicycles. Fort Collins has an extensive network of cycle routes and a thriving brewing scene, and our friends combined the two, taking us round the city with stops for locally brewed beer. New Belgium and Odell are both here, and New Belgium has a long association with cycling, which seems an entirely sensible combination to me.

After a week of enormous landscapes and famous monuments, it was a pleasure simply to enjoy a city at a leisurely pace in the company of friends.

Mesa Verde

Leaving Fort Collins, we headed south through Colorado, spent a night in Pagosa Springs, and went on to Mesa Verde National Park in the state's south-west corner.

The name means green table in Spanish, though the land is better described as a series of high wooded mesas cut by deep canyons. The road into the park climbs steadily, winding round the hillsides with ever wider views of the country below.

For centuries Ancestral Pueblo communities lived and farmed here, and in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries some of them built whole villages beneath great overhangs in the sandstone cliffs. We explored on our own, driving between viewpoints and stopping for short walks. At Cliff Palace we looked across at an entire settlement sheltered under the rock: stone walls, towers, rooms, and the round chambers called kivas, used for ceremony and gathering.

It was extraordinary to think of people building and living in such a place. We did not take a ranger tour into the settlement itself, but there was plenty to take in from the viewpoints. Mesa Verde is not simply a collection of ruins; it asks you to imagine how people lived in this demanding country. And the Ancestral Pueblo people did not simply disappear. Their descendants include today's Pueblo communities, whose traditions continue.

For us, the meeting of history and landscape made Mesa Verde one of the most interesting places on the whole journey.

Red rock and a long day west

From Mesa Verde we went on into Utah and spent the night in Moab. We had seen Arches National Park on an earlier trip, so this time we let the road do the showing. The country grew drier and more open, and red and orange rock took over: great rounded forms beside the road, cliffs and towers, and holes worn right through the sandstone. South of Moab, Wilson Arch stands right beside the highway.

You do not always need to enter a national park to appreciate the Southwest. Sometimes the road provides quite enough entertainment.

The next day was one of the longest of the trip. As far as we can tell, we drove from Moab to Ely, Nevada, in a single day, with no night between, and it was on this run that we joined US Highway 50.

The Loneliest Road

US 50 became one of the highlights of the entire journey. The stretch across central Nevada is known as the Loneliest Road in America, a name that comes from a 1986 article in Life magazine, which quoted the motoring organisation AAA saying there were no points of interest along it. Nevada's tourism people rather cleverly turned the insult into an attraction.

I am glad they did, because US 50 is extraordinary.

The pattern is wonderfully repetitive, yet never boring. You drive across a vast open basin towards a mountain range that seems to block your path. The road starts to climb, bends its way up to a pass, crosses over and drops down the other side. And there ahead of you lies another enormous basin, with another range on its far side.

Then you do it again.

And again.

All day, and into the next.

This is the Great Basin, a vast region of parallel ranges and broad valleys whose rivers drain into closed basins rather than reaching the sea. It is dry and thinly peopled, but calling it empty misses the point entirely. There is always something to look at: the shape of the distant ranges, the changing colour of the rock, the enormous sky, the light moving across the valley floor. Now and then a small town appears, a reminder that people have lived and travelled through this country for generations, and parts of the road follow the old routes of overland emigrants, the Pony Express and the first transcontinental motorists.

It was windy, and cool, especially on the mountain stretches.

Collecting stamps on the Loneliest Road

Nevada had also devised an entertaining way to keep people going. You pick up a passport, have it stamped in the towns along the highway, and send it off for a certificate once it is full. We asked for one at a gas station early on US 50 and, as I remember it, got most of our stamps from the hotels where we stayed, and our reward duly arrived. Naturally, we joined in. It was a bit of fun, but there was something surprisingly satisfying about it: we had crossed the Loneliest Road in America, and we had the souvenir to prove it.

I think our last night on the route was in Fernley, although I cannot be completely certain. What I do remember is the road itself. It was one of the most beautiful and memorable drives of the whole trip.

Over the Sierra to the Bay

US 50 had one more gift for us. From western Nevada we went south of Reno, down the east side of Lake Tahoe, and followed the highway over the Sierra Nevada, the great mountain wall between the Great Basin and California, then west through the Eldorado National Forest to Placerville. It is not a quick route, and it is very hilly, but after the dry basins of Nevada the change was dramatic. From Placerville we dropped down to Stockton and on to Walnut Creek, east of San Francisco, where friends were expecting us.

We spent more than a week with them, glad to stay in one place after weeks on the move. They took us up to Napa, in the wine country, and into San Francisco more than once. We walked in the Presidio, above the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and round the Palace of Fine Arts. We rode the cable cars, climbed the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps, a long flight faced in bright mosaic, and had dinner in Chinatown.

On other days we took the boat out past Alcatraz to Angel Island, looked out over the city from the top of Coit Tower, and went up Mount Diablo, the peak that rises above Walnut Creek.

Then it was time to return the car to its depot in downtown San Francisco and fly home. We had collected it in Boston at the beginning of September, stocked up on provisions and headed north without knowing quite what the month would bring. Now we had reached the other side of the continent.

Doing it now

We drove this in 2019. Most of what we saw is as it was, but some things a traveller needs to know have changed. Everything here was checked in November 2026, starting with four of the stops most worth your time.

Mount Washington Cog Railway

Trains run from early May to late October, weather permitting. Book ahead, take a warm layer whatever the weather below, and count the summit view as a bonus: cloud hid ours.

Badlands National Park

The Badlands Loop Road lies just off the way west from the Missouri to Rapid City, with viewpoints and short paths all along it. The ground is broken rock, so wear proper shoes.

Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills

Rushmore, Crazy Horse and Deadwood fit into one full day from Rapid City. Rushmore's evening lighting ceremony runs nightly to 30 September. At Crazy Horse, where work on the hand and arm continues, leave time for the cultural centre.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Sprague and Bear Lakes are on Bear Lake Road, which now needs its own timed-entry permit from late May to mid-October. September's permits are released on 1 August.

• Two border crossings. You need a passport for each, and the entry rules for Canada and the United States depend on your nationality, so check both. Check too that your rental company allows its car into Canada. A one-way rental from coast to coast usually carries a drop charge, so compare companies.
• Hoot Night at the Wildcat. We could not confirm that Hoot Night still runs on Tuesdays. Check with the inn before you build your first night around it.
• Mesa Verde. Entering Cliff Palace means booking a ranger-led tour, run from May to October. We saw it from the viewpoints, as you still can.
• Travelling with children. Split the eight- and nine-hour days in two.
• The Loneliest Road passport. The scheme still runs: collect stamps in the towns along US 50, send the passport in, and a certificate signed by Nevada's governor comes back.

Keeping the journey on the road

Most days on a trip like this go exactly to plan. A few precautions keep it that way.

• If a tornado warning comes, go to the lowest floor, away from windows, as our hotel told us to.
• Don't stack long days. Split the nine-hour runs if you can, and stop every two hours on busy freight roads like Highway 401.
• Fill up in every town on US 50 in Nevada, and carry water. The towns are far apart and phone signal comes and goes.
• Check the mountain passes in the Rockies and the Sierra before you cross. Early snow can close them in autumn. If the pass you planned is shut, wait in the last town below it rather than trying a minor road over.
• On US 50, Ely, Eureka, Austin and Fallon are the places to sort out a problem. If the car fails between them, stay with it and phone the rental company's roadside number, which is on the rental agreement. Where there is no signal, wait for passing traffic: the road is quiet, not empty.
• If a long day is going badly, stop at the next town with a motel and start again in the morning.