On May 17, 2010, my wife, Barbara, and I left our home in Oracle, Arizona, to begin a month long road trip. We planned to drive from the Mexican border to the Canadian border on US Route 89. This was our third border to border trip and, at thirty-two days, our longest. Before arriving home again, we would drive a total of 6,000 miles. We stopped to make photographs in almost all of the 20 national parks and monuments on or near highway 89. We also took the time to stop along the road whenever something caught our attention and the light was right.

For this book, I selected thirty photographs. Each one is an expression of my response to a particular place at a particular time. Collectively, they depict spring in the diverse landscape of the western United States from blooming cactus in the desert of Arizona to the melting snow on the Rocky Mountains in Montana. The photographs are arranged in order of their location from south to north along highway 89.