Some places overwhelm, others underwhelm, and others could clearly give a damn about you, your observations, or your travel agenda. These are the places for those traveling to rip open the sky in search of the end of the world.

It’s easier to feel cavalier and entitled stepping off of a plane into the museums and cafes of a European metropolis. Whether resented or welcomed, tourists are embedded within the central nervous system of such a place.

Then, there are places where travelers merely scrabble across the surface of something old, and vast, and cold. Places where only your feet can take you, far beyond where the road ends.

There’s a wind that screams through these places, with the same backbone to it in Patagonia as at the foot of the mountains bordering Tibet. It’s a wind that tastes like glaciers and cuts through bone, a wind that wants to rip you off of the side of the mountain. Even the locals seem like they’re barely clinging to the face of the thing; they know they’re living in treacherous space on borrowed time.

Travelers come and go, and the locals watch them, marking time. Everyone leaves nothing more than shallow footprints in the snow that are quickly swept away over ice-locked peaks, and deep forests, and naked rock.

This post is part of the Arriving/ Leaving series.

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By Joy