There’s a certain insanity to driving out into the Oregon high desert after you’ve just conquered a mountain. Iron Mountain was still rattling around in my bones, my lungs lined with the dust of alpine wind, my brain fried on star-saturated delirium and yet here we were. Plotting a beeline for Shaniko. Population: questionable. Sanity level: irrelevant.

The road would stretch out like a thin nerve through an open skull, no trees to hug you, no shade to hide under. Just the brutal sun punching down on cracked asphalt and the old bones of a once-proud wool capital. Shaniko isn’t a destination in the normal sense. It’s a strange fever dream baked into the desert. A place where time not only stopped, it keeled over and refused to get back up. Weathered facades grin at you with toothless charm, and rusted-out machinery sits like dinosaur carcasses, baking under an indifferent sun.

Robert will bring the lenses. I’ll bring the paranoia. Between us, we’ll try to capture what it feels like to walk down streets where the air tastes of ghosts and sunburn, where every creak of a warped wooden board sounds like some old outlaw’s last words.

By the time we get there, the caffeine will be running thin and the heat will be climbing into triple digits. Perfect conditions for chasing shadows across Main Street and picking fights with rattlesnakes we can’t see. We’ll shoot until our memory cards are bloated with images of peeling paint, bent nails, and the lonely defiance of a town that refuses to vanish entirely.

In the end, Shaniko will get under the skin like it always does. A cocktail of nostalgia and unease. It’s the kind of place where you leave feeling like maybe you’ve been conned… Or maybe you’ve just stolen something intangible from the past. Either way, the next madness will be waiting just over the horizon.