I left Albuquerque and drove west, heading towards Acoma Sky City, an ancient pueblo on top of a Mesa. It was closed to visitors. So instead of visiting their village I visited their casino: a dark room with the soft blingings of electronic slot machines and men slumped in front of their shiny casings. There is one real-life blackjack table (fully occupied), but the rest of the customers are pulling levers or pressing buttons.

I lost $5 within two minutes on an electronic poker game. Surely it can’t be this easy to lose, I thought. It is. But still I padded around on the deep carpet and continued to feed dollar bills into machines until I ran out of cash (a further $6 I think). One machine was totally indecipherable. The big bright “GO” button was clear enough so I pushed that a few times. Some chimes played and lights flashed but after four iterations all my money was gone. Interesting.

Any regret caused by the casino was quickly erased by the drive which followed. Mountains distant and blue; sandstone outcrops jutting sheer along the side of the road; a vast spread of jagged black brittle rock from dead volcanoes: badlands.

I crossed into Arizona and stopped for lunch at a family diner in Quemado: the daughter was waitressing, the mother was cooking, and the father, dressed up as a cowboy, swatted flies. Salty, salty, hot soup and ice-cold Coca-Cola. From Quemado I took US 191 and pine forests began to emerge, and mountains, and lakes. Not at all what I’d imagined from Arizona. I slept that night in a town called Alpine.

I drove out of Alpine on the US 191 and climbed high into a rainstorm. In the invisibility of the rain I crossed into a new valley and descended. After dropping below clouds I saw the landscape had changed completely: the earth had become a crumbly red and a terracotta stream ran along the road’s edge. A wet green snake stretched itself out along the asphalt and without any time to stop I ran it over. In the rearview mirror I could see it writhing.

After spending three days in Tucson with company (friends of friends of friends) I drove the long and scenic route to Flagstaff. The road scaled giant dry mountains then ducked into the valleys between them. In Tonto Valley the road rose a little and the bottom became a glittering azure reservoir called Theodore Roosevelt.

Heavy rain heralded my arrival into Flagstaff and sunk me rapidly into melancholy. My quick and dirty self-diagnosis was that I was suffering from the immediate separation from company after having become completely adjusted to its absence.

The evening found me buying "camping food” in an organic supermarket, filling the tyres with air in an attempt to appease the gods of the car’s dashboard (they said my tyre pressure was low), eating turkey club sandwiches, and drinking two beers. Tense!

I was out of bed by 04:30, in McDonalds eating a Bacon Egg McMuffin at 05:15, and on the road driving towards the Grand Canyon by 05:30. Precursory fissures start to appear in the desert about 10 miles before the national park’s entrance but there is absolutely no preparation for the all-at-once WHAM when you first see the canyon appear.

No adjective-noun pairings are worth the attempt when describing what you experience when you stand on the canyon’s rim. And anyway, you’ve seen the photographs. But photographs, words, paintings, etc. … any attempts at representation of the Grand Canyon will fall way short of real, front-on confrontation with the wonder. So I won’t even try.

After walking the rim all day I spent the night in a tent at the Desert View campsite.

The sun and the cold inside the tent demanded that I wake early. And so I obeyed. After packing up all my kit I took a final trip to the Desert View lookout to have one last confrontation with the canyon. In the softer morning light, the gap, which was jagged and severe at midday, was now awash and lush and oceanic. I blinked and I was back in the car, dashing north on long highways. But the views never ceased to let up.

Just outside the National Park gates, trailer homes bake in the red desert and the remains of trucks decorate their “front yards”. Then black hard dunes.

Crossing into Utah the stones become sculpted and white and lie bitter and exhausted in dusty scrub. I spend another night in a tent.

Just before sunrise a crowd gathered in Bryce Canyon and the tone was hushed at first. It wasn’t long until an American family started naming things loudly. Another family joined in because they also liked to say things. Some others decided to sing. When the sun rose everyone shut up and began clicking at their cameras furiously. The hoodoos basked in the attention.

In Panguitch a tattooed man is offered a lick of his girlfriend’s ice-cream. He has a long ponytail which sticks out from his trucker’s cap and a dense, wiry beard which comes to a narrow point near his chest. “No thanks”, he replies, “I’ll only end up wearing it!” They both laugh for quite some time.