It was one of those mercurial fall days that’s sunny and blustery in turns and leaves you unsure whether you should be wearing sunglasses, a jacket, or both. After a short, indifferent summer autumn was here in force, and my friend Ashley and I were fleeing the rainy weather for somewhere warmer and drier.

Ashley and I met back in college and knew we were platonic soulmates when we discovered that we had the exact same birthday—same day, same year. Since this year we were turning thirty, we decided we should do something big to celebrate the death of our youth and the onset of old age, and we settled on a road trip around the American Southwest. Which was why, as the evening began to threaten rain, we crammed our camping gear in the back of Ashely’s SUV and set off on an adventure.

Our first day (officially designated Day Zero) brought us only as far as Portland, where we crashed on a friend’s sofa and then woke up at a disturbingly early hour (that would be Day One) to start driving. Our spirits were high as we cruised through the Columbia River Gorge on I-84, excited to be underway and excited that this plan, unlike all too many adventurous plans, had not fizzled out in the planning stage. We were actually doing it!

The western section of the Gorge is breathtaking, but the further east we went the grayer the landscape became. As the hours and miles slid by, our good spirits slipped a little. We both felt a little under the weather and the dull sagebrush hills offered nothing to keep us interested in the drive. The only excitement came when crossed the Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon, which were so deeply shrouded in fog that traffic slowed to a crawl as the highway began its steep ascent. I was driving at the time, Ashley asleep in the passenger’s seat, and I kept a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, barely able to see the car in front of me. As we crested the Blue Mountain Summit, the fog lifted a little and we found ourselves suddenly in the midst of a pine forest, as if the fog had transported us to a different world than the sagebrush steppe below. The pines were dusted with a fine layer of snow, though the road was clear and black. This should have set off alarm bells in my head, but I was too entranced by the beauty of the forest to pay attention to the warning signs.

By the time we reached our first stop, Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho, we realized we’d made a terrible mistake. We’d vaguely considered that our desert destinations might be cold at night, but we didn’t factor in latitude and elevation. Craters of the Moon is pretty far north and pretty high in elevation, and so, dry as it may be, it’s very, very cold in October. We scrambled to set up our tents while a mixture of snow and icy sleet made our fingers go numb.

Craters of the Moon is a Dark Sky Park, meaning it’s so free of light pollution that its night sky is almost pristine. The amazing stargazing opportunities that go with this was of the reasons we were so eager to visit it. The stars were indeed beautiful—what little we could see of them as we slurped down a hasty dinner of noodles between chattering teeth. Defeated by the cold, we scrambled into our separate tents and tried to find some way to get warm enough to sleep. My toes were already numb when I climbed into my sleeping bag, and eventually I was forced to peel off my down jacket—I was sleeping in the jacket, plus a fleece, plus an insulated shirt, and still shivering in my down sleeping bag—and wrap it around my feet before the feeling returned.

In the morning (of Day Two), the fly of my tent was so stiff with frost I had to fold it back like a sheet of paper to climb out. The air was cold. Cold cold cold cold cold. The tent stakes burned my fingers when I pulled them out of the ground. We ate breakfast in the car, with the heater going at full blast.

When it was light enough to see, we drove around the loop road, gawking at the bizarre landscape surrounding us. It really did look like surface of the moon, if the moon were painted matte black. Frost glittered on the dark rock, and a few trees struggled to survive in shallow pockets of soil. We scrambled up one steep volcanic butte, and the high altitude left us unexpectedly breathless and giddy.

When the cold became too much, we climbed back into the car and started on another long day of driving. We decided to break up the monotony with a stop for lunch in Salt Lake City. We’d heard a lot of crazy stories about how taboo it is to drink alcohol there, and we wanted to see for ourselves what it was like to order a beer in the capitol of Mormonism.

The answer is… pretty much like anywhere else in the country. We found a brewpub close to downtown, ate brewpub food, and drank brewpub beer. We could have been almost anywhere. Outside, though, there was something distinctly Salt Lake about the city. The architecture had a distinctly Western feel, the streets were unusually wide, and there was… something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The brewpub might have been anywhere, but the city was definitely here. I had driven through Salt Lake City several times and been frankly disgusted by what I saw from the freeway, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover the city core was actually very beautiful.

Unfortunately, we dallied too long over lunch. Full darkness fell as we drove south from Salt Lake City and we were still over an hour from our campsite. I began to get anxious: I hate driving through unfamiliar places at night and I hate trying to find a campsite in the dark. After trying to talk myself out of it for a while, I confessed to Ashley that I didn’t want to keep driving anymore. There was a KOA in Green River, only a few minutes ahead; could we stop there for the night? She agreed, and we wound up pitching our tents on an overpriced patch of lawn next to a motel parking lot. It was hardly the experience of natural splendor we’d had in mind.