About the Guide
The Long Way is a guide to the places worth getting off the highway for in the eleven western states, written for people who take the two-lane road on purpose. The unit of the guide is the detour: the hot spring up a gravel road, the fire lookout you can rent for a night, the county fair, the weekend a small town closes Main Street for its own celebration.
It covers Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, with a few entries in British Columbia where a kind of place runs north.
The Three Tests
A place belongs in the guide when it passes two of three tests.
- The detour
- Would a stranger drive forty minutes out of the way for it?
- The stranger
- Can a one-time visitor with no membership, no local friend, and no standing reservation walk in and have the whole of it?
- The place
- Could it be moved to another town without losing anything? It must not be. Chains and franchises fail here.
How an Entry Is Compiled
Every entry is researched from the place’s own pages, from agency pages, and from the registers kept by the people who run such places: a Forest Service rental listing, a county fair board, a chamber of commerce. Review sites and rankings are never a source. Where an entry has a written account, it is composed only from those sources, and the sources are listed at the foot of the entry.
Photographs come from the place’s own pages or from openly licensed collections, and each carries its credit. A place with no photograph shows none; no picture of somewhere else stands in for it.
Nothing Is Rated
No entry is rated, ranked, or starred. An entry says what is there, when it is open, what it costs, and how to reach it. Where a fact could not be found in a source, the entry leaves it out rather than guess, because the worst thing a detour guide can do is send someone up a gravel road to a locked gate. Hours and seasons change, so check the place’s own page before a long drive.
The guide holds places and the recurring happenings that belong to a place, such as a rodeo or a town’s own days. It is not a calendar of events.