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Two blues, one bruise-pink sky, and a mountain that has never once looked like this in real life. Free in three formats below. No email, no cart, no popup begging for your attention.

Thirty miles from the nearest road, three times over.

A 9,777-foot mountain at the far end of the Thorofare, drawn from memory and a week’s worth of squinting at it over a fly rod. Free in three formats below. No email, no cart, no popup begging for your attention.

The farthest you can get from a road

Hawks Rest is not a famous mountain. It is famous for what surrounds it, which is nothing. The Teton Wilderness holds the most remote location — farthest from any road — of anywhere in the contiguous 48 states, and that point sits very close to Bridger Lake, near the confluence of the Thorofare and Yellowstone rivers, not far from the Hawks Rest ranger station. Hawks Rest itself is a 9,777-foot mountain, known chiefly for being as far from a road as a person can get in the Lower 48.

There is no shortcut. The shortest trail from a road to the center of the Thorofare is 32 miles. There are several ways in, and none of them take less than a long day on horseback. I’ve done it three times, all three on a horse, and I recommend the horse. The math is unkind to boots and generous to anything with four legs and a bad attitude.

What you get for the ride: no cell service, very few humans, and numerous streams and lakes full of Yellowstone cutthroat trout. A week of that is enough to recalibrate a person. You stop checking things. You start noticing that the light on the Absaroka rim goes red for about eleven minutes in the evening and then quits, which is the entire reason this illustration exists.

You are also not alone in the way that matters. Grizzly bear, wolves, moose, elk, and the cutthroat are all in there, and the valley sits inside roughly 2.1 million contiguous acres of roadless wilderness. The name is honest: for Native people and early trappers the Thorofare was the easy passage through an otherwise impassable stretch of the southern Absarokas — a highway with no road in it, which is a fair description of the place still.

A four-hundred-year-old bur oak standing alone in a Missouri floodplain, drawn at the exact ten minutes of evening when the sky does something unreasonable. Free in three formats below. No email, no cart, no popup begging for your attention.

Four hundred rings and one bad road shoulder

Take Providence Road south out of Columbia until it becomes Route K, follow it west until it becomes Burr Oak Road, and about two miles northwest of McBaine there it is on your right — standing by itself in a farm field, no other tree within a thousand feet. Locals just call it the Big Tree, which is the kind of name you only earn by being unmistakable.

The numbers are absurd. Ninety feet tall, a canopy a hundred and thirty feet across, and a trunk measuring 287 inches around — roughly four adults holding hands. It is the largest bur oak in Missouri and tied with one in Kentucky for the largest in the entire country. Estimates put it somewhere between 350 and 400 years old, which means it was already a substantial tree when Lewis and Clark rowed past within sight of it in 1804.

It has also had a rough four centuries. The 1993 flood left it standing in six feet of water for six weeks. Lightning has found it more than once — in October 2020 it was hit again and discovered burning from the inside, and the scar is still there. Trees don’t heal so much as seal, and it sealed. It sits on land the Williamson family has farmed since 1835, and the current owner’s assessment of its prospects is hard to argue with: it will outlive all of us.

I drew it from the road shoulder at last light, which is the only time that sky happens and also the only time a car will nearly hit you. Everything here is flat vector shapes in five layers — canopy, trunk, far treeline, field, sky — no gradients, no textures, no brushes. The clouds took the longest. Clouds always take the longest.

The layered AI file is organised, named, and unlocked. Recolour it, crop it, put it on a tote bag. I have made peace with the tote bags.