By the time we reached Mitchell, the road had stripped us down to raw nerves. It’s the kind of town that clings to the edges of survival with one hand and flips off the future with the other. Faded storefronts, locals who measure strangers with a look sharp enough to cut, and a stillness that feels less like peace and more like a dare. Mitchell isn’t dead, it refuses to die, and that defiance hums in the air like static.

But Mitchell was just the gate. The real hallucination was waiting in the desert.

The Painted Hills rise out of the earth like a mirage. Blood-red, mustard yellow, and alien green, layered together in waves of Martian soil. They don’t look real. They look like a hallucination, like the gods themselves smeared the dirt with the last of their paintbrushes and left it behind for mortals to trip over. You walk out on the boardwalk and it’s like stepping into another planet.

The colors don’t just sit on the land they burn. Each stripe is a fossilized scream of ancient climate shifts, volcanic ash, and long-dead ecosystems. You don’t need drugs out here; the desert itself is the trip. The sky was brutal blue, the sun hammering down, and the hills glowed so fiercely they looked radioactive.

We wandered into Painted Hills Cove, the air dead quiet except for the crunch of our boots on the boardwalk. The silence was uncanny, not dangerous, but disorienting. Like standing in a dream where the world had been stripped down to color and heat. Cameras clicked, but no photo could catch it, the way the hills roll like waves, the way the colors pulse under the sunlight. It wasn’t scenery. It was a vision.

There’s a madness in the Painted Hills, but not the paranoia of Antelope or the grief of the graveyard. This is cosmic madness, the kind you get when you realize the earth has been reinventing itself for millions of years, and you’re just a temporary witness. A stoned painter’s afterthought. A two-legged mistake stumbling across the desert with a camera and too much caffeine.

By the time we left, the sun was bleeding out behind the ridges, turning the hills molten red. It felt like walking out of a fever dream, dragging the colors in our eyes, burned into our retinas like acid flashbacks.

The Painted Hills don’t haunt you. They brand you.