We left Montana with a winter storm roiling up hard on the high peaks. By the time we pulled into Red Lodge, the road over the mighty Beartooth Mountains was closed, and fingers of sleet were creeping down her long valleys. We holed up for two days exploring trails along cold and raging mountain rivers. There were lots of those.

With the road still closed over the pass, we shifted east and skirted around the edge of the massive Beartooth and Absaroka ranges. If Red Lodge was quiet, then the broken road leading up and out of town into the remote Wyoming backcountry was completely desolate. Tall, angry clouds were still spilling off the flanks of the mighty Absaroka mountains, chasing us east in the rearview mirror. We skipped through small ranching towns with names like Powell, Greybull, Worland and Ten Sleep. Each small town represents a story that ties this vast quilt of land into a colorful relief of hard-working ranches, open ranges, and someone’s vision. In some towns, faded flags were snapping hard in the wind, and thin smiles were etched deep in brown, weathered faces. Ten Sleep sits at the edge of the remote Big Horn Range. We were the only car sliding through town. It was noon.

Using the Indian method of measuring distance, trappers named the town Ten Sleep because it was “ten sleeps” from Yellowstone and “ten sleeps” from Fort Laramie. It was also the site of one of the last bloody feuds of the Sheep and Cattlemen Wars in 1909. Grazing rights are a big deal out on the range. Big enough that quite a few men and thousands of sheep were killed over said rights. Nothing ever came easy in these parts.

Just outside of town I turned south onto a nameless dirt road that I had never noticed before. My wife, with her fine intuition, expressed mild concern. But I was under the mistaken impression that this road would turn to asphalt just a few miles in. That never did happen, and 45 miles later we were still bumping along on dirt and steering by dead-reckoning whenever we came to muddy intersections. We would choose a direction, then splash through large brown puddles of slush across an expanse of high western plateaus that stretched out rich in beauty all around us. This was a good place to be lost.

Hundreds of antelope surrounded us; at one point, a handful of cowboys, sitting deep in their heavy coats, touched the brim of their hats as we drifted past, dreamlike. We tracked back and forth up a steep jeep road; somewhere along that trail we climbed right out of the clouds.

We pulled over and stepped outside. The sun was bathing the surrounding hillsides in slants of forest green light and the mountain tops in golden warmth. It was the kind of indigo sky that pushed down hard and stretched right to the edge of forever. It was the kind of sky that made you smile, and feel just a little bit dizzy. We inhaled the cold beauty of pine and sage and the moist earth. We did not speak; the vista was loud enough. Sure, we were lost—but we were lost together.

The next mountain pass was steeper and wilder, more horse trail than road. There was no room for error as we scraped up over jagged rocks and then held our breath as we nosed over broken, blind passes. It was gut wrenching at times. But if you’ve lived long enough, you already know that life is like that. Steep and wild and sometimes gut wrenching. No one gets it easy in this life. We all want the safety of the GPS to tell us where to go, what to do. But what we really need is someone who will stand with us and say: “Wherever we go, we will go together.”

There is great wealth in that.

We drove 450 miles that day and we never did see a traffic light.          

Turns out we didn’t need one.