There is a version of this country that you cannot see from a highway or a plane window. The Colorado River from inside Glenwood Canyon, where the walls rise 1,300 feet on both sides and the train tracks run so close to the water that you could almost reach out and touch it. The red sandstone formations of the Utah desert, layered and ancient, lit differently at every hour of the day. The Book Cliffs stretching across the horizon east of Moab, a geological formation so long and flat that from the train window it looks like the edge of something. These are views that were built for rail travel and that nothing else quite delivers.
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