My wife, Elizabeth, and I just returned this past Saturday evening from what was, for us, a 20-day odyssey in the American West.

Our “big loop” towing our little popup camper took us westward from North Carolina over the Smokies to Knoxville, across the Mississippi River at Memphis to Tucumcari, New Mexico, via Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle. From Tucumcari, we veered northeast across the vast Kiowa National Grasslands and then northward up through the Raton Pass into Colorado to Salida, Colorado, on the headwaters of the Arkansas River near Leadville, several hundred miles southwest of Denver.

After five days in Salida visiting with our son and his family, we departed for the Grand Teton National Park in northwestern Wyoming, just south of Yellowstone National Park. To get there we traveled though the dramatic Glenwood Canyon and the stark, almost barren, Wyoming Basin.

Our campsite in the Grand Tetons was alongside the Gros Ventre River near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The route home was eastward across Nebraska and Missouri, then down through southern Illinois and northwestern Kentucky to Knoxville (thereby completing the “big loop”) and back over the Smokies into North Carolina.

I haven’t as yet computed the total mileage covered. I may never do so. And I didn’t take a single photo or make even one written note. The visual images recorded and hopefully stored in my memory bank are what I treasure.

On the largest scale there were the varied geographic-geologic provinces traversed: Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley, Cumberland Plateau, Nashville basin, Mississippi Delta, Interior Highlands, Great Plains, High Desert, Southern Rockies, Wyoming Basin, Northern Rockies, and Central Lowlands.

The rivers of America are simply wonderful. Each is a distinctive living entity ... Mississippi ... Arkansas ... Colorado ... Snake ... Gros Ventre ... Missouri ... Platte ... Ohio ... and so many more. Nothing is more beautiful than the Snake River glinting in the morning sunlight as it braids its way southward at the foot of the Grand Tetons.

The mountains in Colorado are impressive. The Grand Tetons are overwhelming. As Elizabeth remarked, “They are visual overload.” Stretching for miles they arise like a jagged wall, topped by gleaming pockets of snow and ice that almost never melt.

We weren’t prepared for the array of mid-summer wildflowers that appeared in northwestern Wyoming. I have always supposed that the wildflowers along the Blue Ridge Parkway in July couldn’t be surpassed in regard to quantity and beauty. But Wyoming comes close. After purchasing a local wildflower guide, we were able to identify most of them. Many were similar to those found in the Smokies, differing primarily in flower color and leaf shape.

Along the way, we identified perhaps 120 species of birds. The Grand Tetons were interesting in regard to birds. One doesn’t really anticipate breeding American white pelicans or tundra swans in the Northern Rockies. But there they were.

The best birding, however, was along the highways in the Great Plains and in the upper Arkansas River valley. Since we had never before traveled the American West during the breeding season, we were able to tally birds new to us that are otherwise common that time of the year: Mississippi Kites, Broad-tailed Hummingbirds, Western Wood-peewees, Western Kingbirds, Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, Warbling Vireos, Violet-green Swallows, MacGillivray’s Warblers, Western Tanagers, Yellow-headed Blackbirds, Black-headed Grosbeaks, pygmy nuthatches, and others.

There was one bird we did happen upon that can prove elusive even to veteran birders of the region. It was encountered along Chalk Creek Canyon, a tributary of the Arkansas River between Salida and Leadville. To try and get our first pine grosbeak, we deliberately ventured up a four-wheel drive track to an abandoned mining town situated just below tree line at 10,000 or so feet.

The pine grosbeak is a large plump bird with a strongly curved bill that allows it to feed on conifer seeds. We studied our field guides. The male’s upper parts are reddish. The female’s are yellowish. They somewhat resemble a small parrots. The vocalization is a soft musical warble.

We stopped our vehicle in a stand of spruce fir. I got out. There was a musical warble above my head. Through my binoculars I looked upward. There about 100 feet above me was a male pine grosbeak eating conifer seeds. No problem.

It’s quite likely I’ll never see another pine grosbeak in my lifetime, but the clear image of that bird remains in my memory bank alongside so many other images from our western odyssey.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at info@georgeellison.com.