I was born in a small town outside of a Missouri army base; my first four decades were spent in southeastern Wisconsin: Milwaukee, Port Washington, Madison, and Milwaukee again.

In 1992, a longtime friend and I took my old VW Beetle, Sluggo, on a two-week 5000-mile excursion to New Mexico, and we were hooked. A year later, we were back out west with his girlfriend and an old Jeep Wagoneer named “Bella,” bought just for the trip. The next year we returned for Sluggo’s last big excursion: Southern Utah from Arches to Zion. After that it was a Moab rental Jeep named “O.J.”—we were getting mighty tired of driving the 1500 miles between Milwaukee and Santa Fe.

Long story short, by autumn 2001 I had moved to New Mexico, just north of Santa Fe. All these years later I’m a bit too old to do crazy desert stuff now, so my badlands photos are a complete set, a documentary of a wonderful dozen years in the New Mexico outback.