Moving westward, the ridges have the look of a broken vase arranged by a broom, violet under the right light and steel under the wrong, casting north and south forever, each peak a tooth in the jaw slamming shut on those who pass through them from plains long forgotten. Heat dances south to north each season and the cold north to south in kind, hurrying any traveller through or locking them in place never to leave. Spruce, fir, and bristlecone pine gunk hands for days and cling to stone for life. Through the first pass is more steel and iron, water in a hurry to flee ice as quickly as it can, and the host of crags known only to God and then lost. Rock. The next pass, and the next, and the next, and more, the same. Here stars grow hard enough they’re neither near nor far but never in reach. Day and night duel cruelly with no stakes of their own but casting their shadow over all living things. Different insects than the east. Then a drop and scrub that eats resolve and the imposter Wasatch before great expanses of despair and venom to test any and all, khaki and rust in new days, blindness in their maturity followed by sunsets of burning oil floating on seas of sand and gravel. Sick mountains like seafloor ripples grown large, avoidable in constant zags or conquerable in passes to no difference in time. The Sierra Nevada arrayed in porcelain zeal to scold and punish, the gatekeepers of paradise, protectors of laudanum pastures. The valley’s honey mornings a trap, dew gathering on leaf and blade, bleat and moo, tree and row. Low, sharp hills and bushes, and finally a descent to the the world’s last ocean.
This is where the journey ends.
This was a beautiful description. Fraught with a tension tucked around the punctuation marks.
Thank you! I think it will make a good opener.