Every trip has an ending, but some don’t let you go clean. Ours ended at Santiam Pass, high in the Cascades, where the mountains crowd together like conspirators and the clouds roll low with menace. By then, we were running on fumes road dust in our teeth, cameras heavy with ghosts, and minds stretched thin from painted deserts and dead towns.

The pass is a crossroads in every sense. Asphalt cutting through ancient lava flows, forests clinging to black rock, the horizon jagged with peaks that have no interest in your survival. It’s beautiful, yes towering, cinematic, alive with alpine air. But there’s menace here too. The mountains are eternal in a way that makes you feel like an unwelcome guest.

And then there’s the Pacific Crest Trail, sliding across the pass like some great artery of madness. Mexico to Canada 2,600 miles of dirt, sweat, hallucination, and the kind of revelations you can’t buy in a store. Standing where the PCT crosses the highway, you feel it, that pull, that invitation. Not gentle, not kind. More like a challenge. Step off the road, walk north or south, see if the wilderness chews you up before you ever see another town.

We didn’t walk it, not this time. But standing there, watching clouds rip themselves apart on the peaks, it felt like the whole trip had funneled us into this one stretch of trail. From Sherman Campground’s river birth to Antelope’s deathly silence, from Shaniko’s playful ghosts to the Martian madness of the Painted Hills, all of it led here. The wilderness waiting. Endless. Uncaring.

The pass itself was alive with weather, wind whipping, clouds breaking open like old scars, sunlight flashing across ridges and vanishing again. It was a reminder that the trip wasn’t a storybook. It wasn’t a tidy arc. It was chaos, beauty, paranoia, sorrow, and awe all chewed together and spit out into the dirt.

When we finally turned the wheel west, back toward the lowlands and the noise of the world, I felt that old road-trip contradiction: relief and regret. Relief to leave the weight of Antelope, the cult whispers, the graveyard sorrow. Regret to step away from the raw, unfiltered reality of it all. Because once you’ve seen the Painted Hills glow in the dying sun, once you’ve stood where the PCT dares you to walk into oblivion, everything else feels thin. Artificial.

Santiam Pass didn’t give us closure. It gave us a direction. A reminder that the road is always out there, curling into places stranger, darker, and more magnificent than reason should allow.

And so it ends the way it always does: engine humming, dust in the rear-view, the wilderness in the mirror, and the madness still rattling in your skull.

The road isn’t finished. It never is.