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13 Best Books About Road Trips to Satisfy Your Summer Wanderlust

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The classic American road trip book has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years, from On the Road by Jack Kerouac to Cheryl Strayed's Wild . At this point, there's a road trip-themed pick for everyone, including YA romps about couples on the run ( I Wanna Be Where You Are ) and family-friendly audiobook options ( Walk Two Moons ) . Only the bold of heart should try out a road trip thriller , however.

For many who've had their vacation plans break down this summer, now might also be a perfect time to get on the open road to explore all the weird nooks and crannies this country has to offer. If you're planning to drive to a far-off destination, try listening to these road trip books on tape —between belting these classic car songs , of course.

Or, you know, you could just read one of these quintessential road trip novels from the comfort of your own home. Either way, the following 13 books—including a couple of comical romps, a pair of 1950s classics, a semi-surreal comic book, and more—will inspire you to put on your sunglasses, or your reading glasses, and leave your old world behind.

The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky

Tautly told and drolly smart, Dermansky's third novel centers on a woman in Queens locked in a loveless marriage . The key to her freedom, and to unlatching her sense of self, is the titular red car, bequeathed to her when her beloved mentor passes away. If you want an entire novel that captures the gleeful, devil-may-care liberation of Thelma and Louise driving off a cliff (and believe us, you really, really do) then this one's for you. 

I Wanna Be Where You Are by Kristina Forest

Here's something you should know about Chloe Pierce: She's an excellent ballerina, and a terrible driver. Still, in an effort to get into the school of her dreams, Chloe breaks her mom's rule (whoops) and steals the car (double whoops) to drive to an audition in D.C. Her irritating neighbor, Eli, insists on hitching a ride. Kristina Forest's heart-warming YA debut captures a girl on the cusp of adulthood, pushing the limits of her independence—and dealing with the consequences. 

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

In her review for O , acclaimed author Carmen Maria Machado said of Luisell's inventive novel: "Not since  Lolita  has a road trip so brilliantly captured the dark underbelly of the American dream, the gulf between its promise and reality." This story of a family traveling southwest in search of answers to our nation's troubling past and present was one of our favorite books of 2019 . 

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Beware—once you meet Charlie Manx, the immortal villain of  NOS4A2 , you'll forever fear seeing his haunted car drive by you on a quiet road. By then, it'll be too late.  NOS4A2 is a road trip novel, made sinister: Characters travel on roads that don't exist on any map.  Manx transports children in his car to "Christmasland," a place far more sinister than it sounds. On her magic bike, Vic McQueen is able to travel to Christmaslands and other realms, and is the one person who can stop him.  NOS4A2  comes with horror pedigree: Joe Hill, the author, is Stephen King's (very talented) son.

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith's 1952 novel—originally published under a pseudonym—is perhaps most famously the basis for the film Carol , a queer modern classic starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. But saying that it's just a book that was turned into a movie would take away from the quietly revolutionary sumptuousness of the text itself. Highsmith's wintry tale of two women in mid-century America who drive across the country together to escape society's expectations is a must-read. 

We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon (translated by Beth Fowler)

More forbidden love on the run! Translated from Portuguese, this exquisite and wistful novel by Bensimon—named one of Granta's Best Young Brazilian novelists—follows former friends Julia and Cora on a car trip through Brazil as they attempt to mend their once-solid relationship. Complications arise when the pair realize they might not just be gal pals. 

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Soon to be a miniseries on HBO co-produced by Jordan Peele, Ruff's chilling thriller is set during the Jim Crow era and stars an army veteran whose father has disappeared. He drives from Chicago to New England alongside his uncle, the publisher of a guide on how to travel while Black. Much more Get Out than Green Book , the tale takes a turn toward terror when they arrive at a mansion owned by a family of former slave-holders. Also: ghosts. 

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Maybe you read this in high school, maybe you dated a boy like Jess from Gilmore Girls who referenced this book nonstop (guilty and guilty), but there's no denying: reading Kerouac's Beat Generation classic of aimless American wanderlust is basically a rite of passage. 

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

Speaking of On the Road , the Super Sad True Love Story author delivers a hilariously scathing romp through America starring a boorish hedge funder who, after a fight with his wife, hops on a Greyhound for an inspired journey into the country's heart—and his own. 

Find Me by Laura van den Berg

Short fiction scribe Laura van den Berg taps into her singular eeriness for her first novel, about a directionless young woman who discovers she's immune to the sudden sickness spreading across the country. Her epic yet intimate journey takes her from Kansas, where she's admitted as a hospital patient and subjected to myriad tests, to Florida, where she believes her birth mother might be. 

Flaming Iguanas by Erika Lopez

Erika Lopez's "all-girl road novel thing" is a fierce amalgamation of words and images chronicling biker babe Tomato Rodriquez's wild cross-country motorcycle ride. It's as fun and freeing as having the wind blow through your hair. 

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

Want more illustrated cool-girl goodness? Combining dreamily gorgeous artwork and lyrical, sophisticated storytelling, Eisner award-winning graphic novelist Tillie Walden has emerged as a master of her craft. Here, she channels Murakami with a magical realist road trip starring two women and a mysterious cat. 

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

If you're seeking a family-friendly audiobook to listen to in the car, look no further than Sharon Creech's Newberry Award-winning classic. Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle journeys across the country with her grandparents. All the while, she entertains them with stories of a girl who's quite like herself—a girl who wants to be reunited with her mother.  Walk Two Moons  is a strange, funny book that will speak to children of all ages.

Michelle Hart is the Assistant Books Editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Other writing of hers has appeared on the Millions, the Rumpus, and the New Yorker . Her fiction has appeared in Joyland and Electric Literature. She has been awarded a fiction fellowship by the New York State Writers Institute and was once profiled in her hometown newspaper for being in the process of writing a novel--a novel she is still in the process of writing.

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17 Books to Inspire Your Next American Road Trip

With most international borders closed to Americans for 2020, there is no time like the present to plan a Great American Road Trip!

The options of beautiful places to visit on a Great American Road Trip are endless but what is the most scenic drive in the United States?

Well, that depends on what you’re looking for — mountains, ocean, desert, lakes, or farmland.

From East Coast to West Coast to Cross-Country Road Trips, here are 17 American Road Trip Books filled with ideas to inspire your next adventure!

Table of Contents

List of American Road Trip Books

1. 50 states 500 state parks: an essential guide to america’s best places to visit.

By Publications International Ltd.

National Parks seem to dominate bucket lists these days but did you know there are over 500 State Parks across all 50 states ? From beaches to mountains, wildlife reserves to historic sites, this book will give you some American road trip ideas for planning your next domestic adventure.

2. 50 States, 5,000 Ideas: Where to Go, When to Go, What to See, What to Do

By Joe Yogerst , National Geographic

The travel experts at National Geographic have put together a comprehensive, illustrated book filled with 5,000 ideas on places to visit in all 50 states , plus every province in Canada. From well-known famous sights to relatively undiscovered hidden gems, there is bound to be something for every type of traveler on this list.

3. 100 Drives, 5,000 Ideas: Where to Go, When to Go, What to Do, What to See

By Joe Yogerst, National Geographic

Another great read from National Geographic, this sequel to 50 States, 5,000 Ideas gives readers inspiration for 5,000 places to visit on 100 different drives from Alaska to Hawaii and the 48 contiguous states, plus 10 Canadian provinces!

4. 1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die

By Patricia Schultz

You’ve probably heard of the famous 1,000 Places To See Before You Die book, but why not start off your quest with these regional 1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die ? The title is a bit morbid but the suggestions in the book are anything but.

5. Lonely Planet USA’s Best Trips

By Simon Richmond, Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet has taken the hassle out of planning road trips with their book about the 51 best road trips in the USA ! This beautifully-photographed tome also includes planning advice, itineraries from 2 days to 2 weeks, detailed maps and directions, and other essential information to make your road trip dreams a reality.

6. National Geographic Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways: The 300 Best Drives in the U.S.

By National Geographic

The folks at National Geographic have compiled practical planning tips and information on 300 of the best drives in the good ‘ole U S of A, from day trips to multiple week-long adventures in all 4 corners of the United States and everywhere in between.

7. NYT. 36 Hours. USA & Canada.

By Barbara Ireland

This is the perfect book for the full-time working wanderluster. The New York Times has compiled entries from its 20-years-old “36 Hours” column to bring us weekend itineraries spanning, you guessed it, 36 hours in 150 destinations across the USA and Canada.

8. Off the Beaten Path: A Travel Guide to More Than 1000 Scenic and Interesting Places Still Uncrowded and Inviting

By Reader’s Digest

A book after my own heart! I’m a lover of hidden gems and relatively undiscovered places so Reader’s Digest’s compilation of 1,000 off the beaten path places is right up my alley! Sure, the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge are obviously worth visiting but have you ever thought about following the dinosaur trails through Colorado?

9. Road Trip USA: Cross-Country Adventures on America’s Two-Lane Highways

By Jamie Jensen

This author traversed nearly 400,000 of two-lane highways in order to narrow down a collection of 35,000 miles of the best stretches of pavement for would-be road trippers. The book includes hundreds of possible itinerary combinations and over 125 detailed driving maps to make your next road trip a breeze.

10. Roadfood: An Eater’s Guide to More Than 1,000 of the Best Local Hot Spots and Hidden Gems Across America

By Jane Stern

The best part of traveling is the food, amiright? The Roadfood eater’s guide provides over 1,000 unique options for travelers who are tired of repetitive roadside chain restaurants. The legendary chef James Beard said that “this is a book that you should carry with you, no matter where you are going in these United States.” SOLD.

1 1. Route 66: The Mother Road 75th Anniversary Edition

By Michael Wallis

Can you even call it a Great American Road Trip if you don’t traverse “America’s Main Street,” Route 66? The 75th Anniversary Edition of Route 66: The Mother Road pays homage to the people and places along this iconic stretch of pavement that has been traveled by road warriors over the past eight decades.

12. Secret Route 66: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

By Jim Ross & Shellee Graham

For road trippers who have “been there, done that” and seen the main sights of America’s Main Street or who gravitate towards hidden gems in their travels, Secret Route 66 is the perfect remedy. This tribute to the Mother Road highlights 90 places along Route 66 that, as the name implies, are weird, wonderful, and obscure.

13. The Most Scenic Drives in America: 120 Spectacular Road Trips

By Editors of Reader’s Digest

This recently revised and updated book is the perfect coffee table book for anyone who enjoys landscape eye-candy. The editors at Reader’s Digest have put together 120 of the most scenic drives in America and is great for active road trippers and armchair travelers alike.

14. The Open Road: 50 Best Road Trips in the USA

By Jessica Dunham

Part of the notable Moon travel guides family, The Open Road is a collection of 50 of the best road trips in these great united states. Whether you’re looking to travel coast-to-coast or just get away for the weekend, there is bound to be an itinerary that fits the bill.

15. The Ultimate Pet-Friendly Road Trip

By Amy Burkert

Just because you’re going on a road trip doesn’t mean you need to leave Fido behind. In fact, I’d argue road trips are the best type of travel for pet owners. This book offers up the ultimate pet-friendly road trip bucket list of 49 attractions across the country so you don’t need to leave your furry companion at home when you hit the road.

16. Unique America – Strange, Unusual, and Just Plain Fun: A Trip Through America

Are you the type of traveler that looks to the Atlas Obscura website first for ideas for your next trip? If so, then Unique America is for you. Get ready to see the world’s largest ball of twine, a floating bridge, or a ginormous artichoke the size of your car.

17. Where To Go When the Americas

By DK Eyewitness

DK Eyewitness Travel Guides are my go-to choice when I have an upcoming trip. I love the balance between visual representation and easy-to-digest information about the places they cover. Where To Go When is only last on this list because it’s in alphabetical order, haha. But if you’re looking for seasonal inspiration for your next American road trip, look no further.

Have any of these American Road Trip books inspired your next adventure?!?!

More Wanderlust-Filled Book Recommendations

• 17 Books That Will Inspire You To Visit America’s National Parks

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About Laura

Laura is an avid traveler who aspires to live a life filled with adventure and a dash of luxury and hopes to inspire others to do the same. She seems to consistently be drawn to lesser-traveled hidden "pearls" and loves to give these under-the-radar places the credit they are due. Laura can often be found on the ski slopes in the winter and is obsessed with all activities involving water...and mac and cheese...and Golden Retrievers.

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AMERICAN ROAD TRIP

by Patrick Flores-Scott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018

A compassionate success.

After Teodoro’s older brother, Manny, left for Iraq, the Avila family began to fall apart.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the Mexican-American Avilas downsized to a dumpy rental home amid a loss of income. Teodoro doesn’t see much hope for his broken family, but news of Manny’s return inspires the Avilas to improve their lives. Spurred on by an old childhood friend, Latina Wendy Martinez, and his Polynesian best bud, Caleb Ta’amu, Teodoro even tries to become a college-bound student. But when Manny comes home, he can’t shake off the shock of war. Situated between the hope-filled election of Barack Obama and the beginning of Teodoro’s senior year, Flores-Scott’s ( Jumped In , 2013) latest explores the fragile bonds of a fractured family through moments full of poignant confession and self-discovery. Teodoro’s funny, wry first-person narration features quick, emotionally charged sentences that provide the narrative a breathless, hard-hitting quality. In hopes of helping Manny heal, Teodoro’s spunky sister, Xochitl, plans an impromptu road trip, ensnaring an unknowing Teodoro in the process. The trio travels all along the West Coast, reconnecting with old friends and family. A final stop in New Mexico offers Teodoro the chance to help his brother confront his PTSD, pull his family together again, and possibly begin something meaningful with Wendy. Featuring a diverse cast of delightful characters, this novel bursts with much-needed optimism.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-62779-741-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: June 23, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

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by Patrick Flores-Scott

IF HE HAD BEEN WITH ME

by Laura Nowlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2013

There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.

The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.

Autumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart; their mothers are still best friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like[s] him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations.

Pub Date: April 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4022-7782-5

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013

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A GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER

From the good girl's guide to murder series , vol. 1.

by Holly Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2020

A treat for mystery readers who enjoy being kept in suspense.

Everyone believes that Salil Singh killed his girlfriend, Andrea Bell, five years ago—except Pippa Fitz-Amobi.

Pip has known and liked Sal since childhood; he’d supported her when she was being bullied in middle school. For her senior capstone project, Pip researches the disappearance of former Fairview High student Andie, last seen on April 18, 2014, by her younger sister, Becca. The original investigation concluded with most of the evidence pointing to Sal, who was found dead in the woods, apparently by suicide. Andie’s body was never recovered, and Sal was assumed by most to be guilty of abduction and murder. Unable to ignore the gaps in the case, Pip sets out to prove Sal’s innocence, beginning with interviewing his younger brother, Ravi. With his help, Pip digs deeper, unveiling unsavory facts about Andie and the real reason Sal’s friends couldn’t provide him with an alibi. But someone is watching, and Pip may be in more danger than she realizes. Pip’s sleuthing is both impressive and accessible. Online articles about the case and interview transcripts are provided throughout, and Pip’s capstone logs offer insights into her thought processes as new evidence and suspects arise. Jackson’s debut is well-executed and surprises readers with a connective web of interesting characters and motives. Pip and Andie are white, and Sal is of Indian descent.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-9636-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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• INTELLIGENT TRAVEL

Books to Inspire the Ultimate American Road Trip

Last May, the two of us set out on the road to work on “ America by Night .” Funded in part by a National Geographic Young Explorers grant, the project aimed to explore and document what some Americans do while most others sleep.

At this point, we’ve spent more than 100 days and nights on the road, driving more than 20,000 miles through 36 states.

Before we embarked, we assembled a little library of books about rambles and adventures in America that we hoped would help us prepare for life on the road and get us excited about the prospect of living in our car for months on end.

During our trip, these books traveled with us in a shoebox. We’d flip   through them for sections relevant to where we were traveling. Often one of us read aloud while the other drove.

Some books were better than the others. The best of them reminded us to be open and curious and to see wonder in the world even when we were tired, cranky, and homesick–or when the car’s A/C conked out during a Vegas heat wave. They showed us the possibilities of the road, and instilled the sense that we were on a grand adventure–even in the moments when our trip didn’t feel like one.

Here are five of our favorite books on wandering in America to inspire your next journey, big or small:

1. American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders , by Richard Grant

“Anyone who has fallen under the spell of this country, or any big wild place, knows the temptation. We have all wondered, if only in passing, what it would be like to go further out there, deeper into the wilderness; to cut the ties to civilization and turn trips and expeditions into a permanent state of being.”

Finding happiness in transience, British writer Richard Grant moves to America and spends several years on the road. Armed with a fearless form of immersion journalism, Grant traces the history–and mystique–of wandering in America, blending with it tales of his own journey and those of the fellow nomads–from drug-crazed cowboys on the rodeo circuit to retiree RVers convening in Quartzsite, Arizona–he meets along the way.

2. Travels with Charley: In Search of America , by John Steinbeck

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

To cure the itch of restlessness, Steinbeck takes to the road in 1960 with his poodle, Charley, and his truck camper, Rocinante. The book chronicles his journey around the U.S., one which takes him through cities, small towns, and national parks. Despite the recent controversy regarding its veracity, the book is enduringly powerful, an observant and deeply reflective work that gives us at once a portrait of a changing mid-century America and of the man himself.

3. Blue Highways: A Journey into America , by William Least Heat Moon

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do — especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

After losing his job and separating from his wife, Heat Moon seeks escape and reconnection in the country. His account of his three-month quest to explore America by way of its back roads is as expansive, meandering, and contemplative as the 13,000-mile route itself. The book details the author’s encounters and observations as he dodges interstates and big cities in search of small-town America. In the end, Heat Moon reminds us of the value of people and places unsung, and produces a portrait of America that is deeply authentic–and surprising.

4. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America , by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

“This land, in short, lacks nothing to be regarded as blest.”

Sent to conquer Florida in 1527, Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca is one of four survivors when his ship wrecks off the coast of Texas. This account, written as an official report to the King of Spain and first published in 1542, chronicles Cabeza de Vaca’s experience wandering in America’s borderlands, largely on foot, in the eight years before he was able to reconnect with Spanish colonials. Unsurprisingly, his trials along the way drastically alter his perspective–but it is precisely these changes that make the book so relevant to modern readers.

• Nat Geo Expeditions

5. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail , by Cheryl Strayed

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild…It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

Though this journey happens on foot, it still provides inspiration for the wandering soul. In 1995, in the wake of a divorce and her own mother’s death, Strayed, then 26, strikes out alone to hike 1,100 miles of Pacific Crest Trail wilderness, from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border. Feeling “loose in the world,” Strayed begins her trek with no backpacking experience, woefully unprepared. The book, which weaves the myriad physical challenges, pitfalls, and accomplishment Strayed encounters on the trail with details of her previous life, is ultimately a paean to the renewal that comes from sloughing off the familiar in search of solitude.

When they’re not documenting what Americans do at night,   Nat Geo Young Explorer   Annie Agnone   is a candidate for an   MFA in creative writing   and Kevin Weidner   works as a writer, editor, and educator in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  

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Are you ready for a Road Trip? Explore these eleven incredible cross-country road trip routes across the U.S.!

Pacific Coast

Border to Border

The Road to Nowhere

The Great River Road

Appalachian Trail

Atlantic Coast

The Great Northern

The Oregon Trail

The Loneliest Road

Southern Pacific

Classic American Road Trips

Pacific Coast Highway

Starting at the northwest tip of the United States at Washington’s Olympic National Park and remaining within sight of the ocean all the way south to sunny San Diego, this 1,650-mile, mostly two-lane road trip takes in everything from temperate rainforest to near-desert.

Highlights along the Pacific Coast Route: Olympic National Park (WA), Three Capes Loop (OR), Redwood National Park (CA)

Historic Route 66

The romance of traveling along historic Route 66 from where it starts in Chicago and ends in Los Angeles continues to captivate people around the world. If you’re looking for great displays of neon signs, rusty middle-of-nowhere truck stops, or kitschy Americana, do as the song says and “get your kicks on Route 66.”

Highlights along Route 66: Chicago (IL), Meramec Caverns (MO), Tucumcari (NM), Painted Desert (AZ), Santa Monica (CA)

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Running coast-to-coast from San Francisco to Ocean City, Maryland, “The Loneliest Road in America” is a 3,200-mile odyssey from sea to shining sea. US-50 passes through a dozen different states, four state capitals, and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.

Highlights along the Loneliest Road: South Lake Tahoe (CA), Moab (UT), The Million Dollar Highway (CO), Washington D.C.

Following in the footsteps of pilgrims and pioneers, US‑20 takes in a little of everything during its two-lane trek from Oregon’s rugged coast to the glorious sea and sand of Cape Cod.

Highlights along the Oregon Trail: Cannon Beach (OR), Fort Boise (ID), Yellowstone National Park (WY), Mt Rushmore & Carhenge (NE)

Dubbed the Great Northern in memory of the pioneer railroad that parallels the western half of the route, US‑2 is truly the most stunning and unforgettable, not to mention longest, of all the great transcontinental road trips.

Highlights along the Great Northern: Tumwater Canyon (WA), Glacier National Park (MT), Lake Michigan (MI), Acadia National Park (ME)

The Appalachian Trail

This driving route of the Appalachian Trail parallels the epic hike. From the top of New England to the heart of Dixie, it takes you through continuous natural beauty—without the sweat, bugs, or blisters.

Highlights along the Appalachian Trail: Mt. Washington (NH), The Poconos (PA), Shenandoah National Park (VA), Great Smoky Mountains National Park (NC)

Old Man River, Father of Waters, “body of a nation,” Big Muddy: By any name, the mighty Mississippi River cuts a mythic figure across the American landscape. Tag along from its headwaters in Minnesota to where it meets the sea in Louisiana via the GRR.

Highlights along the Great River Road: Main Street USA (WI), St. Louis (MO), Natchez Trace Parkway (MS), New Orleans (LA)

Starting at the Statue of Liberty and ending with a drive across the Overseas Highway to free-wheeling Key West, these almost 2,000 miles of roadway run within earshot—if not sight—of the Atlantic Ocean.

Highlights along the Atlantic Coast: The Statue of Liberty (NJ), Assateague Island National Seashore (MD), Savannah (GA), Cocoa Beach (FL)

Starting at Canada’s Jasper National Park, and winding down in the Sonora Desert, this route traverses some of the wildest and most rugged lands imaginable: mighty mountains, glaciated valleys, raging rivers, and two very different deserts.

Highlights along the Border to Border Route: Columbia Icefield (AB), Bitterroot Mountains (MT), The Extraterrestrial Highway (NV), Joshua Forest Parkway (AZ)

Once the only entirely paved route from Canada to “Old Mexico,” US‑83 cuts across America’s heartland and remains a must-do long-distance byway—transnavigating this broad, odd nation without once grazing a conventional tourist destination.

Highlights along the Road to Nowhere: Sitting Bull Memorial (SD), Nebraska Sand Hills (NE), Monument Rocks (KS), Paint Rock Pictographs (TX)

Following old US-80 and its contemporary equivalents takes you through more varied cultural and physical landscapes than you’ll find along any other cross-country route. From deserts to bayou swamps and Tex-Mex to barbecue, this route offers a full-flavored taste of America.

Highlights along Southern Pacific: The Desert View Tower (CA), Tombstone (AZ), Roswell (NM), Civil Rights Movement National Historic Trail (AL)

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Eight Books to Take With You on a Road Trip

In these titles, the open highway sparks a reaction between a character and the unknown.

On a long, meandering road trip—especially one with no particular destination or strict timeline for arrival—something hypnotic happens. You become attuned to the voices on the radio, the strange grammar of the signs, and the variations in the unfamiliar landscape in ways you never do during more conventional travel. I’d posit that it has something to do with being in constant motion and freed of immediate obligation. The mode of transport is important too: Airplanes move too fast and fly too high, and travel on foot is too slow and too low to the ground. Cars, trains, and buses make the topography change at a speed the mind comprehends.

I’ve personally driven more than 10,000 miles around the United States in a pickup truck that was also my temporary house, and I’ve always loved stories set on the highway. But I didn’t understand why until I wrote my forthcoming novel, Housemates , about two queer women trying to find themselves as artists and driving across Pennsylvania to receive a dubious inheritance. A moving vehicle pressurizes every thought, feeling, and interaction, prompting unique confessions and realizations. The eight books below show that road-trip stories are fundamentally about those unstable, generative, surprising reactions that arise as an ordinary character drives into the unknown.

The Price of Salt , by Patricia Highsmith

People tend to think of Highsmith’s classic as a lesbian romance rather than a road novel, but it’s both: The second half of the book takes place in a car, as the protagonist, Therese, decides to go with her crush, Carol, on a trip west during those peculiar, formless weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. Sharing motel rooms with two twin beds in anonymous small towns, the women can finally act on their mutual attraction. Therese discovers that she likes being Carol’s passenger, as it allows her to train her gaze, and her camera, on Carol and the American vistas, seeking a new kind of understanding. Carol, freed from the imprisonment of her suburban town and her husband, is finally able to lean into her sexual power, turning her probing curiosity to Therese. Only in this remote, liberated setting can the pair see each other clearly enough to recognize that they are in love—and yet they’re being followed by a mysterious car and an overly friendly man. Their romance pushes the novel to its difficult, but surprisingly sweet, conclusion.

Nevada , by Imogen Binnie

When Maria’s girlfriend, Steph, drops shocking news about their relationship over brunch, Maria’s dull reaction is to line up five beans in a row on her fork and eat them. She’s a literary-minded trans woman who works at a New York City bookstore and is tired of teaching people about being trans; she’s also deeply dissociated from her body. The breakup is the catalyst for Maria to change her life, which she kicks off by stealing Steph’s car and heading west. She ends up in Nevada, where she meets and becomes intensely fixated on a stoner Walmart employee named James, who she believes is a closeted trans person needing to be taken under her wing. A predictable story about a stuck character would end with that character reaching a state of un-stuck-ness, but that isn’t what Binnie chooses here. Maria is not exceptional, and her role isn’t to be a perfect trans role model; instead, she remains real and confused and continually searching, like all heroines.

Read: The cult classic that captures the grind of dead-end jobs

Eat Only When You’re Hungry , by Lindsay Hunter

This funny, devastating novel begins when middle-aged dad Greg rents an RV in West Virginia and drives it along the southeastern coast to find his son, GJ, now missing but last seen in Florida. Hunter’s prose pays much attention to Greg’s aging, fat body as he drives; the reader learns that he was intensely shamed for his size and his hunger in his youth. But repressing every appetite turns out to be painful for Greg and impossible for GJ, an addict whose own desires have eaten him alive. The fruitless search for GJ takes Greg through the forgotten fringes of America—parking lots, gas stations, motels, highways—and offers intense images and interactions that prompt Greg to examine his memories of his childhood, and his actions as a husband and father. The RV’s journey along this lush and troubled southern scenery mirrors Greg’s journey to recognizing his complicity in GJ’s addiction; each mile reinforces that he has only inflicted on his son the harm that was done to him.

Love Is an Ex-country , by Randa Jarrar

In this fragmented memoir that stitches together Jarrar’s many excursions through America and beyond in her 30s, the writer doesn’t so much drive as saunter across the country—sashay, roll, meander, and play around in it. She describes such moments as the dangerous airport detention she faced when denied entrance to her family’s native Palestine and the time she schooled a racist long-haul trucker in a rest-stop bathroom; in each retelling, she puts her body and her electric mind, with all its insight gleaned from her many identities—queer, Muslim, Palestinian American, fat, femme—in the driver’s seat. Her travels prompt her to examine how people of color are excluded in cultural emblems like kitschy road signs, or how dolls serve as the earliest receptacles of little girls’ rage. The book deploys discrete paragraphs, set off by double-spaced breaks, that defy chronology and evade cause and effect in a deadpan, deceptively simple tone that asks the reader to think about the land itself—whose we are on, and why and how our nation came to be.

Lost Children Archive , by Valeria Luiselli

This novel is about the Great American Road Trip story more than it neatly fits into the genre. A husband and wife, who are both audio documentarians, and their children, a boy and a girl, set off on a cross-country car trip to Arizona. Instead of buying souvenirs and seeing the Grand Canyon, however, the four come across a landscape full of pain and dispossession—“fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides,” Luiselli writes. The story brims with allusions to canonical American road-trip texts such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the poetry of Walt Whitman , and Luiselli breaks up the prose with Polaroids, reports on migrant fatalities, and the reproduced text of a fictional book from within the story, posing the question of whether facts or expressive art forms are the better tool against the violence and forced displacement the characters witness. Nothing is solved, and the travel itself seems to break the foursome apart more than unify them, but much is revealed about what it means to make a family—and a nation—along the way.

Read: The death of the pioneer myth

The Sunset Route , by Carrot Quinn

Quinn’s road is not highways but train lines. Raised in poverty in Alaska by a mother with schizophrenia, the author writes with precision about leaving home at 14 and ending up in Portland, Oregon. There, Quinn dumpster dives for food, finds chosen family among queer punks and straight-edge anarchist communities, learns about gender outside the binary, and discovers that semi-legally riding on freight trains is a means of pleasure, movement, and escape. The Sunset Route alternates between timelines: In one, Quinn is a queer adult train-hopping and, later, long-distance hiking in the Pacific Northwest, where they meet people who are also living on the fringes of America without a safety net. In the other, they recall memories of their childhood, characterized by abuse and anorexia. Ultimately, their writing offers a precise accounting of how their awe for the natural world became their most honest and reliable method to heal.

Cruddy , by Lynda Barry

This title is not for the faint of heart; both its central father-daughter relationship and the road trip on which the pair embark radiate a deep horror. The narrator, Roberta, who refers to her parent only as “the father” throughout, opens her story with a chilling summary: “According to the newspaper version of the story, the father stole me, kidnapped me, snatched me up in the middle of the night,” Barry writes. “The father drove through the darkness. He drove and he drove.” Where Roberta and the father go on their terrifying journey or how long they are gone are never clear—the reader knows only that they’re both subject to his whims. Roberta loves and fears the violent, mentally ill man at the wheel, and the farther they drive, the clearer it becomes that in order to survive the expedition, she must love herself more than she wants to save him from his demons. Their voyage begets isolation and vulnerability, and Barry uses it to explore what happens when the person who is supposed to protect you turns out to be the biggest threat of all.

Read: My God, this is a magical country

Brother & Sister Enter the Forest , by Richard Mirabella

The pivotal car travel takes up a paltry section here, but it is impossible to look away from. Brother & Sister Enter the Forest follows two siblings as they try to find their way through a haze of trauma and estrangement. Justin is unhoused, dealing with PTSD and the physical effects of a traumatic brain injury; Willa is a nurse who makes dioramas of her and Justin’s childhood. When Justin shows up at Willa’s door asking to move in, the narration turns its gaze backwards to the events that broke them apart—a road trip that Justin took with a violent ex-boyfriend in the aftermath of a terrible crime. The trek is the book’s dark, truthful center, casting a shadow of gay shame and survivor’s guilt that takes Justin and his sister decades to see clearly. Still, even outside of those few crucial pages, the plot is infused with driving, aimless and otherwise. “I love this idea,” the siblings’ mother says to Justin. “Taking someone out in a car. You’re trapped. So we can really have a good talk without you running away like you always do.”

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Great American Road Trips - Scenic Drives

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About The Book

Product details.

• Publisher: Trusted Media Brands (February 2, 2021)
• Length: 192 pages
• ISBN13: 9781621455240

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Raves and Reviews

Whether taking a cross country trip or planning a staycation, “Great American Road Trips” is the ultimate guide to scenic drives. Even if you are not planning a road trip anytime soon, it still contains exceptional pictures and information about each scenic drive. The first person descriptions make them more realistic. Highlight: each section ends with a quote and being from Texas and having lived near Fredericksburg, I am partial to the one after ‘Southwest,’ “Where flowers bloom, so does hope” by Lady Bird Johnson because it accompanies the picture of a field of bluebonnets near Fredericksburg. Seeing all these flowers along side the road every spring is awe-inspiring. All the pictures are colorful and they make each destination look more inviting. “Great American Road Trips” is an extremely helpful resource for anyone planning a scenic drive or two and might just inspire a bucket list altogether.

– Sandra Cruz, SA Examiner

"Great American Road Trips: Scenic Drives by Reader’s Digest, is a bible every road tripper should have." "Great American Road Trips: Scenic Drives has astonishingly beautiful photography throughout. It’s the type of book you want to read over and over again and then dream about it later."

– Revecca Olkowski, BabyBoomster

"Whether you want a leisurely drive along the coast, the best drives for Fall foliage, or a more adventurous drive along the highest road in America, Great American Road Trips is a must-have guide. In a world inundated with road trip guides, Scenic Drives stands out because of the personal touch they bring to each journey. The photos are stunning and the advice great, but the real beauty of this book shines in the form of people who not only drove the routes, but grew up in the vicinity of them."

– Alek @9to5voyager.com, 9 to 5 Voyager blog

"With loads of gorgeous photos, Great American Road Trips: Scenic Drives, offers readers long and short road trips broken out by region: West, Southwest, Midwest, Southwest, and Northeast. For each trip, the authors provide helpful insider tips, must-see stops, nearby attractions, and photos that give you a glimpse of the scenery you will see along the way. If you are looking for travel inspiration for the Great American Road Trip, or a collection of photographs of American scenery, I would recommend this book as I think you will enjoy it."

– The Roaming Historian, The Roaming Historian blog

"The book's beautiful color photographs of the Palouse depict green, softly flowing hills that appear to be in motion—amazing to behold. Great American Road Trips: Scenic Drives is filled with bright color photos of similar wonders. It is partly a coffee-table book and partly a travel guide."

– William Caverlee, Perceptive Traveler blog https://www.perceptivetravel.com/issues/0821/books.html

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ARTS & CULTURE

Great road trips in american literature.

From Twain to Kerouac to Bryson, writers have found inspiration in hitting the road and traveling the United States

Abby Callard

John Steinbeck declares in Travels With Charley that Americans descended from those who moved: those who left Europe, those who were forced to leave Africa, and those who came in search of a better life. It makes sense that we would be travelers. “Every American hungers to move,” he writes. But most of us can’t just pack up and leave, so here are 11 books about American road trips for those who can’t break away from life’s commitments.

Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, 1872 and 1883, respectively

Perhaps the standard-bearer for translating the American spirit to paper, Mark Twain wrote two separate accounts of traveling through the country. First, in 1872, he provides a fictionalized account of when he went West to ostensibly be personal secretary to his brother, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Twain’s ulterior motive? Searching for fabled gold. In a somewhat fictionalized account of this period, Twain recounts his time as a frontier newspaper reporter, a prospector, and a writer.

Twain’s second memoir recounts his career as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River in the years before the Civil War. Twain used his rambunctious childhood in Missouri as the basis for many novels, but this book tells his personal biography in more detail. Years later, Twain returns to navigate the same river, and is struck by how industrialization has changed the cities along the river.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957 When this semi-autobiographical work was published, the New York Times hailed it as the “most important utterance” by anyone from the Beat Generation. Though he changed the names, the characters in the novel have real life counterparts. Salvatore “Sal” Paradise (Kerouac) from New York City meets Dean Moriarty (fellow beatnik Neal Cassady) on a cross-country journey fueled by drugs, sex and poetry The novel’s protagonists crisscross the United States and venture into Mexico on three separate trips that reveal much about the character of the epic hero, Moriarty, and the narrator.

Black Like Me John Howard Griffin, 1961 To document the African American experience in the South during the 1950s, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, artificially darkened his skin using medication and UV lamps. He spoke as little as possible and maintained his name and biography. The only thing that has changed was the color of his skin. He traveled through Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia discovering the nuances of race relations in the segregated South. The reaction was varied: Griffin was hanged in effigy in his Texas hometown, but many recognized the book, which sold 10 million copies and was translated into 14 languages, as an important step in human rights activism.

Travels With Charley John Steinbeck, 1962 Near the end of his career, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the country he had made a living writing about. With only his French poodle Charley as company, he embarked on a three-month journey across most of the continental United States. On his way, he meets the terse residents of Maine, falls in love with Montana and watches desegregation protests in New Orleans. Although Steinbeck certainly came to his own conclusions on his journey, he respects individual experience: He saw what he saw and knows that anyone else would have seen something different.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, 1968 Young writer Ken Kesey led a group of LSD-using hippies called the Merry Pranksters around the country in a painted bus in the 1960s. Wolfe combines original reporting with creative writing techniques to both cover the reality of the journey and the hallucinogenic experiences of the characters. The cast reads like a who’s who of counter-culture: Bob Dylan, Neal Cassady, Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Strange and Jerry Garcia. The book remains one of the most intimate and well-respected testaments to hippie subculture.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson, 1971 What many consider the quintessential drug-induced book of the 1970s was an amalgam of two magazine assignments, one from Rolling Stone and the other from Sports Illustrated . Reporting on the Los Angeles murder of journalist Ruben Salazar, Thompson decided that the best way to mine good material out of his source, political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, was to take to the open road and drive to Las Vegas. But when they got there, their intentions turned to drugs, alcohol and gambling. Ever the enterprising reporter, Thompson also took a respite from his highs to take on a caption-writing assignment to cover an off-road desert race for Sports Illustrated . Although the loose narrative blurs the line between reality and what the characters are merely imagining, a sharp critique of American culture permeates the pages.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974 A deep, philosophical book that masquerades as a simple story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Pirsig’s first foray into philosophy writing. Their motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco is also a trip through Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. His friend, a romantic, lives by the principle of Zen and relies on mechanics to fix his motorcycle. Pirisg, on the other hand, leaves nothing up to chance and knows the ins and outs of maintaining his bike.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982 After losing his wife and job as a professor, William Least Heat-Moon sets out on a soul-searching journey across the United States. He avoids large cities and interstates, choosing to travel only on “blue” highways—so called for their color in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Along the way, he meets and records conversations with a born-again Christian hitchhiker, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a Nevada prostitute and a Hopi Native American medical student.

Mississippi Solo by Eddy L. Harris, 1988 Harris was 30 years old when he wrote his memoir of a journey down the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to New Orleans, in a canoe. His discussion of racial issues, a focus of the book, is shaped by his experience of moving from Harlem to suburban St. Louis 20 years earlier. Along the way Harris meets a spectrum of people, forcing him to reassess his preconceived ideas about whom he would encounter on the trip.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, 1989 Prolific travel writer Bill Bryson returns to the United States after two decades in England to search for the perfect American small town. But Bryson finds an America unlike the place he idealizes. In a Chevy Chevette he borrows from his mother, Bryson drives through 38 states eschewing the big city and luxury hotels befitting this famed journalist.

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Abby Callard is an assistant editor at Milwaukee Magazine.

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The Ultimate List of Epic Road Trip Books

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A great book has the power to not just take you along for the ride with the author but to instill in you the burning desire to hit the road yourself. This list of the best road trip books is sure to keep you busy for a while and will make you want to hand your boss your two-week notice and start packing your bags.

I put this list together as I get ready to launch my own road trip book, The Road Always Leads West , another one you should check out! 🙂 

While this is mostly for inspiration or entertainment, be sure to check out my road trip planning guide if you need more comprehensive and practical information about logistics and organization.

5 Best Road Trip Books

On the road by jack kerouac.

We might as well get this one out of the way first, it’s easily the most well-known road trip book ever written, a book which has inspired generations and countless imitations.

Kerouac’s classic book On the Road that details his travels with his friends as they travel across America. The book was heavily steeped in the jazz and poetry culture and is considered the defining work of the Beat Generation, which so influenced the counter culture movement of the 60s.

The book is available as it was first published or you can get the Original Scroll version which was released as written by Jack Kerouac on a continuous sheet of paper 120’ long and which features the real names of his friends, not pseudonyms.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

Heat-Moon set out to put the past behind him by setting out on the open road. The premise of the book is his travels along the smaller roads, marked blue on the map, and discover small-town America.

His travels to small-town America show a country on the verge of change with the increasing homogenization through fast-food culture and strip malls.

Heat-Moon does a great job featuring the lives of the people he meets along the way, a curious cast of characters who live in “those little towns that get on the map—if they get on at all—only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill.”

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

In September of 1960 John Steinbeck, already a successful author, set out to rediscover an America that he worried he had lost touch with. According to Steinbeck’s son, the real reason for his journey was that he knew he was dying and he wanted to see the country one last time.

Steinbeck set out on a giant cross country journey from New York, up to Maine, across to the west coast, down to California then across the southern half of the states back east, before venturing back up the East Coast. Essentially completing a massive circular journey through America.

He had his French poodle Charley in tow throughout his journey through a “New America” that was on the cusp of some great upheaval.

Steinbeck was 58 when he set out on this journey alone (well, with a dog), which just goes to show that isn’t just for young, aimless, 20-somethings.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Part philosophical treatise and part motorcycle road trip across the northern stretch of the United States and then down to California.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the story of a father and son motorcycle trip with a pair of friends but also delves into fundamental questions about how to live life and tries to reconcile science, religion and more.

A powerful read that will not only inspire you to hit the road but inspire you to examine your own perspectives on some of these central themes of life.

The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America by Mike McIntyre

Not a traditional road trip book where the driver is behind the wheel on the open road, but rather Mike decided to hitchhike across the country from San Francisco to Cape Fear, North Carolina, which would be challenging in and of itself. But Mike decided to do it without so much as a penny.

He would have to rely on the goodwill and help of complete strangers on the open road in order to find rides, eat, and have a place to sleep.

It’s an incredible journey and an even more incredible story which highlights the stories and generosity of the folks that he meets along the way.

Five books aren’t enough for you? Well, I’ve got another 10 awesome road trip books below and then a number of reader suggestions.

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10 More Great Books About Road Trips

The new american road trip mixtape by brendan leonard.

Brendan Leonard has become one of the leading modern voices for road trips and the transformative nature of nature and the great outdoors.

Post-breakup Brendan set out by himself to explore the American West as he lived in the back of his station wagon. This book tackles the American Dream and the call of the open road in Brendan’s humorous and unique style.

His most recent book, Sixty Meters to Anywhere , is another incredible read about overcoming alcoholism and finding himself through climbing.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Krakauer’s book is not strictly a road trip book, nor is it a first-person book about a road trip, but rather traces the incredible story of Chris McCandless and his nomadic wanderings.

After graduating college back east, Chris donated what remained of his college fund and drove west, eventually abandoning his car and hitchhiking across the west for a number of years. His travels led him to a Walden’s Pond type existence in the Alaskan bush where he was found dead.

The book has a sad end, but the story of his travels and Krakauer’s incredible writing will inspire you to hit the road in Chris’ footsteps undoubtedly. I know it did for me. This is one of my favorite books ever written.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of the best travel writers out there, able to turn the simplest or seemingly boring concepts into insightful, interesting, and often humorous reads.

After living abroad in the United Kingdom for many years, Bryson sets out to rediscover America by visiting its small towns.

Bryson’s book about hiking the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods , is still one of my favorites.

Drive Nacho Drive by Brad Van Orden

Drive Nacho Drive tells the story of Brad and his wife Sheena quitting their jobs, giving up the American Dream and driving south in their old beat-up Volkswagon Van named Nacho.

The road takes them through all of Central America, past the Darien Gap to South America and finally to the “end of the earth” in Patagonia where the Pan-American Highway finally ends.

A pretty incredible read that might just inspire you to think about taking your road trip internationally ( like we did ).

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another of America’s finest authors sets out on the open road, this time F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame, who sets out with his wife Zelda on a drive from Connecticut to Alabama.

These serialized articles compiled into a book of their journey in a dilapidated car (the rolling junk) and tell the story of a younger America.

Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman set out on a road trip exploring the deaths of famous musicians across America.

He covered nearly 7,000 miles as he visited the place where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed, where Kurt Cobain committed suicide, or Jeff Buckley drowned in a river.

An interesting basis for a road trip book, for sure, especially if you love music.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

A wild and drug-fueled road trip to Las Vegas by the one and only Hunter S. Thompson.

The book, beyond the manic drug-addled scenery, paints a different picture of Las Vegas, one that had not yet been taken over by the larger than life hotels and commercialization of the Strip.

Side Note: While Vegas isn’t necessarily my favorite place it is a great place to base yourself for some epic road trips from Las Vegas .

American Nomads by Richard Grant

Richard Grant spent more than 15 years wandering the American West alongside the hobos, truckers, retirees, and hippies, documenting the lives of those who wander the American West.

Grant examines the myths and realities of the often romanticized open road, while also examining the sedentary nature of the American Dream.

He contrasts the stories of modern wanderers with the historical characters, the frontiersmen and conquistadors, who set loose upon this same landscape centuries ago.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Neal Cassady, who also is featured prominently in Kerouac’s On the Road, set out to drive Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ bus across America in a psychedelic LSD-fueled mission that takes road “trip” to a whole new level.

The book offers a look into the hippy, counter-culture movement of the 1960s.

Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon

Ted Simon spent an astonishing four years driving around the world on the back of a motorcycle in the late 70s. I actually had the chance to meet Ted at the Overland Expo .

He set out from London for more than 63,000 miles through 45 countries in Africa, South America, Australia, Asia, before arriving back home.

An incredible journey in the days before cell phones and the internet, and all done solo with no support team or social media updates.

7 More Reader Suggestions for Best Road Trip Books

I reached out to friends, followers, and readers of this blog for a few of their favorite road trip books. Here’s what they recommended.

Traveling Music by Neil Peart

The drummer for Rush explores the inextricable link between road trips and music, how music is the soundtrack to our lives, by telling autobiographical stories based on music from a solo road trip.

Road Scholar by Andrew Codrescu

The Romanian-born writer sets out in the shadows of Kerouac as he discovers America behind the wheel.

One for the Road by Tony Horowitz

Tony set off on a 7,000-mile adventure through the Australian Outback.

Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurtry

Larry has written an homage to the road itself, where the route is the destination and not just a means.

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham

A journey by bicycle through Mexico, Japan and on to Vietnam as Andrew (born in Vietnam but raised in California) travels he also confronts issues of cultural identity, immigration, and more.

Ghost Rider by Neil Peart

Another book by the drummer from Rush, this time Neil hits the road soon after losing his wife and daughter within a year of one another.

A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins

More than 25 years ago Peter set out to walk from New York to New Orleans in the company of his trusty dog, not quite a traditional road trip, but definitely in the same spirit.

What road trip books would you add to this list? Sound off in the comments below.

The Road Always Leads West

Of course, I’d be remiss not to mention that you check out my book The Road Always Leads West if you love a good road trip story… 🙂  

More Book Recommendations

• 26 Books to Inspire Your Next Epic Summer Road Trip from Buzzfeed
• The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips
• Books to Inspire the Ultimate American Road Trip
• The 9 Best Road Trip Books from Adventure Journal
• Road Trip! 10 Books About Cross-Country Adventures
• 10 Must-Read Travel Books from Desk to Dirtbag

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Hilarious story and travelogue about fulfilling a foolish bar bet – Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks

Great list. Could suggest a fictional road trip list: The Road – McCullers Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck Cold Mountain – can’t remember

I am sure you have more. Steve

Wow. All books written by white men. Would love to see more diverse voices.

Please feel free to contribute any non-white men voices, I’m always looking for cool new road trip reads!

Like Nomadland by Jessica Bruder.

Oh yeah, Nomadland has been on my list to check out… Thanks for the reminder.

William Least Heat-Moon is native American. I would also add River-Horse by him as well.

The road narrative has historically been a white male thing. There aren’t a ton of other voices. I would recommend Valeria Luiselli, The Lost Children Archive. She does an admirable job Paying homage to previous road works. I loved it.

Thanks for the list. I read a lot while travelling. It’s very meditative and relaxing for me. A few of these I have read, but I plan on adding to my list with a few of these books. I always use my kindle too, as it’s much lighter and holds thousands of books.

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American Road Trip Hardcover – September 18, 2018

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A heartwrenching YA coming of age story about three siblings on a roadtrip in search of healing. With a strong family, the best friend a guy could ask for, and a budding romance with the girl of his dreams, life shows promise for Teodoro “T” Avila. But he takes some hard hits the summer before senior year when his nearly perfect brother, Manny, returns from a tour in Iraq with a devastating case of PTSD. In a desperate effort to save Manny from himself and pull their family back together, T’s fiery sister, Xochitl, hoodwinks her brothers into a cathartic road trip. Told through T’s honest voice, this is a candid exploration of mental illness, socioeconomic pressures, and the many inescapable highs and lows that come with growing up―including falling in love. Christy Ottaviano Books

• Reading age 12 - 18 years
• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 7 - 9
• Lexile measure HL550L
• Dimensions 5.69 x 1.17 x 8.43 inches
• Publisher Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
• Publication date September 18, 2018
• ISBN-10 1627797416
• ISBN-13 978-1627797412
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

A Teen Vogue Best Gift Book for Teens A Texas Tayshas List Selection A Washington Evergreen Teen Book Award Nominee A Georgia Peach Book Award Nominee A YALSA Best Fiction List Selection "Told via T’s honest, engaging, and often-naive voice, the story openly explores mental illness spawned by war and how the illness affects family members and those around them. This powerful story also reminds readers that the paths to their dreams may have to take detours but are still attainable. "-- Booklist , starred review "In a story about mending broken ties, making sacrifices, and visiting landscapes and loved ones from the past, Flores-Scott invites readers to follow T on a road trip that brings to life the Avilas’ Latino heritage and Manny’s disorder. . . it celebrates many things: family love, realized dreams, and the taste of a green chile cheeseburger. "-- Publishers Weekly, starred review "Adeptly provides a window and a mirror of Latinx culture and reimagines the American road trip as an individual journey, one deeply anchored in sacrifice for those we love." -- School Library Journal , starred review "Written in T's vulnerable, observant voice, 'American Road Trip' holds true to classic road-trip themes like the emotional power of singalongs and unexpected detours, but it also wades into the darker waters of mental illness with both realism and sensitivity ."-- The New York Times " American Road Trip is as multifaceted as its protagonist, Mexican-American teen Teodoro (known as “T”), wrapping a moving multigenerational story into a endearing coming-of-age tale ."-- The A.V. Club "Flores-Scott's latest explores the fragile bonds of a fractured family . . . Teodoro's funny, wry first-person narration features quick, emotionally charged sentences that provide the narrative a breathless, hard-hitting quality . This novel bursts with much-needed optimism. A compassionate success. "-- Kirkus Reviews " Flores-Scott’s character development is extraordinary . . .Readers will find themselves intimately connected to and cheering for the success of these siblings. With strong messages of hope, survival, and the power of family, American Road Trip is a must-read. "-- VOYA

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., american road trip, henry holt and company.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2008

Daylight creeps into the game cave.

I turn to Caleb. "We played all night, man. We played all night."

Caleb Ta'amu does not respond. His wide body is sucked into the sofa, long hair frizzing wild, eyes bugging on a flat screen, zombied out on too much Halo.

I toss my headset. Dig through fast-food wrappers on the coffee table. Grab my phone and shove it in Caleb's face.

He slaps my hand, pissed I'm messing with his gamer trance. "What the hell, T?"

"Check the time!"

Caleb checks it. He whips off his headset. "Do not tell me it's tomorrow."

"It's tomorrow, Caleb."

He drops his controller. Hops to his feet. "You gotta get outta here."

We sneak upstairs. Caleb opens the door. He rubs his eyes in the gray morning light. "Second day, junior year. We're off to a stellar start."

"Yeah," I say. "We're killing it."

"You gonna try and make first period?"

"I guess. You?"

"I guess. If my dad doesn't strangle me first. You better go, T."

I hike the sidewalk-less, residential streets of SeaTac, Washington. Drizzle spraying my face. Water sloshing through my shoes. A mile of dark, evergreen-tree-lined streets. Shabby houses, beige apartments, barred windows, rusted cars on blocks ...

I arrive at my destination.

But I can't go inside.

I stand, stuck in this spot on this potholed road, soaking up rain to the rumble soundtrack of Sea-Tac Airport jumbo jets.

They come. They go. Move in and out.

I cannot move.

And I can't stop staring at the dented-up front door of a tiny, falling-down rental house — our tiny, falling-down rental house.

And I can't stop thinking how we got here.

How two summers ago, we rode the happy housing bubble right into a bright blue, boxy, four-bathroom house down in Des Moines. My mom and dad's marriage needed a spark. My dad hoped a big new house would do the trick.

One year later the housing bubble popped.

The whole economy popped.

Orders for Boeing planes slowed way down and Fauntleroy Fabrication in Seattle — where my dad machined airplane parts and my mom was a warehouse clerk — went belly-up.

Papi's fat union check was gone.

Mami traded her living-wage job for part-time work at Walmart.

And we went from being a family that didn't worry much about money, to one that did.

I'll never forget the night last spring. My dad drove me and my sister, Xochitl, ten minutes from Des Moines to SeaTac. And he parked right here in front of this rental. Right where I'm standing. He told us he'd done the math and decided it would be better to hang on to some savings and walk away from the new house now, than be stuck owing way more than it's worth. He'd rather tank his credit for years than put us in a deeper financial hole. He said we'd swallow our pride and move on.

Then he pointed at the dented-up metal door. And said we'd be living here for a while.

The drizzle turns to showers. I take a step toward that door.

But I can't do it.

I can't open up.

Cuz I can't stop thinking about my big brother, Manny.

And I can't stop thinking about us back when we were still living in our old house — the solid little house we all grew up in — the one where we still lived when Manny left us for Iraq. For years, every time I saw our front door, I'd have this hope he'd be inside when I opened up. My brother would be sitting there, smiling at me like he never went to war. He'd be ready to toss a baseball. Take me for a ride in his Mustang. Fishing at the Des Moines pier. Slurpies. Double-scoop cones. French fries and homework help.

I'd see that old door, and I'd feel that stupid hope.

But Manny's tours of duty kept getting extended.

So I gave up hoping for Manny.

And I settled for hoping I'd walk in and catch my parents dancing or cooking together again, teasing each other like they used to. Something would click and they'd remember how good they were before my brother shocked us with his big announcement.

Spring of his senior year, Manny sits us down and tells us he's off to basic training right after graduation. He says he's been planning this ever since those towers fell a year and a half before.

My mom flips. She tells him he can't go because he's headed to college. She tells him he can't kill people for this lie of a war. That's what Mami tells him.

He gives Manny a back-pounding hug. Tells him he's proud and gives him his blessing.

And that's the start of my parents fighting their quiet war at home.

The front doors have changed since then.

But Mami and Papi haven't changed.

Screw it. I'm soaked to the bone and freezing cold. I walk up. Turn the knob. And push in that messed-up door.

My big sister is sitting at the table. Xochitl is postshow buzzed. Scribbling in her journal. Badass in her purple-striped hair and tattooed arms. Smelling like cigarettes and beer.

She shakes her head at me back and forth, dramatic, fake-parental, wagging her finger, then pointing at the spot on her wrist where a watch would go.

I shrug my shoulders. Make a pleading face, playing like I'm in big trouble.

She chokes back a laugh.

I can't help but laugh out loud.

She shushes me, leaves the room, and returns with a towel. Throws it at me.

I sit at the table. She sits across.

It's been so long since the two of us hung out.

And so long since we played Radio Xochitl. I raise my pointer finger in the air.

My sister smirks and shakes her head no.

I bob my head. Oh, yes.

She looks to our parents' room. Mouths the words, It's too late.

I know she can't resist showing off. So I press the invisible power button and Xochitl starts singing.

She's Aretha Franklin. Powerful, even with the volume on low.

They say that it's a man's world.

She keeps her eyes on me.

But you can't prove that by me —

I mime spinning the dial. Xochitl babbles gibberish as stations fly by.

I stop and she belts out norteño — Los Tigres del Norte.

Somos más americanos que toditos los — I turn the dial. Xochitl busts it.

My method on the microphone is bangin' Wu-Tang slang'll leave your headpiece hang —

I spin again and again and she doesn't miss a beat. Dixie Chicks, Café Tacuba, Jill Scott — then serious and intense with some Ani DiFranco ...

What kind of paradise am I looking for? I've got everything I want and still I want more

Even in a whisper, Xochitl can kill you with a song. I poke that power button in the air. Radio Xochitl fades to silence. She's smiling, loving this. I'm smiling. Loving my crazy sister. The doors have changed. Thank God Xochitl hasn't.

Xochitl wasn't quiet enough. My mom woke up and freaked about my all-nighter with Caleb. So today I head straight back to the rental after school.

Xochitl's here, too. She's never home for dinner. I'm guessing she either got fired from selling zit cream at the mall or she quit another band.

Mami doesn't ask questions. We're all home, so she gets to work whipping up her one comfort food specialty: green chile cheeseburgers.

Mami's uncle, our Tío Ed, got married to a New Mexican and moved down there a long time ago. He started farming New Mexican green chile, and for years he's sent us a box every fall. Mami tried out the recipes they make down there, like green chile enchiladas and green chile stew. Those were tasty as hell. But the Avila family go-to became the green chile cheeseburger.

These peppers are not jalapeños. Not poblanos. I got nothing against 'em. But New Mexican green chile was created by the Almighty Gods of Flavor for the purpose of combining heat with cream or cheese and creating ecstasy in your mouth. So Mami only pulls them out of the freezer for special occasions.

I don't think this qualifies as a special occasion. But I'm not gonna argue.

It's a quiet dinner. Nothing but the sounds of faces being stuffed till Xochitl slaps a drum roll on the table. She splashes an imaginary cymbal and says, "I bring you this announcement from Fallujah, Iraq: Manny's coming home! They promised. He's home for good in February."

"How do you know?" Mami says.

"We e-mail. It's all set up. He'll call you with the details."

Mami looks at Xochitl like she feels sorry for her for being hopeful.

We've been burned so many times. I can't stand Xochitl even talking about it.

My dad says, "Vamos a ver, mija. We'll see."

Xochitl scoots her chair back. "We can't wait, Papi." She hops to her feet. "We have to get our act together now. For Manny. "

Barely twenty years old, and she's taking charge. "We have to make this house feel like a home," she says. "We'll paint. Put up prints. Get our old furniture in here."

"Xochitl, stop," I say.

"I'm not stopping. And I'm reinstituting game night. Everyone plays." She points at our parents. "And you two are going out on mandatory dates."

" Xochitl, " Mami says.

"And counseling?"

"Déjalo, mija," Papi says.

"At least talk to Father Michael?"

What is Xochitl talking about? We haven't been to mass in forever.

Then she points at me. "What's Manny gonna think when he sees you, you big lazy clown? There's a world out there, T. Find a passion. Set a goal. And go for it, bro!"

I make a beeline for my room, pissed at my sister for turning on me. Pissed at her for jacking up the volume on our quiet dysfunction.

Before I can slam my door, she says, "He's coming home, guys. Let's see some energy. Let's see some smiles. Oh, and I quit the Art Institute."

"No, Xochitl, no." Mami drops forehead onto palm and shakes her head. "You can't do that."

"I already did."

Xochitl tells them it's great she's quitting because it's too expensive. Plus she can work full-time during the day and help with rent and bills till Papi finds union work again.

"This way I'll be home afternoons before rehearsals to help out," she says.

"We're okay," Papi says. "No te preocupes tanto, mija."

Xochitl looks at the bare walls of the rental. Looks at our parents. Shakes her head. "We have to get right. And we need to do it before Manny comes home."

I wanna tell Xochitl that's impossible. Cuz Manny being here — being with us — is the only thing that can get us right.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Breaks squeal. Rubber doors slap open. I hop a bus headed for Seattle. I do not care where.

It's been a whole week of my sister telling us stuff we already know about how bad we suck. A whole week of her taking charge in a way our parents should be taking charge.

Plus, she bought Risk. And tonight she will open that box. My mom will grumble as Xochitl explains the rules. Papi will ask a ton of questions. Xochitl will try very hard to explain. Mami will roll eyes at both of them. Then Xochitl will bawl them out like she's the parent.

If I'm there, I'll get pissed and walk out and my sister will throw down another lecture about my lame life. And the whole night will be a confirmation that Manny's still gone, my parents are a lost cause, and Xochitl has flipped and she's no longer my sister.

I flash the driver my pass. He nods. The breaks exhale. The engine rumbles and jerks us into traffic.

I would be over at Caleb's, but his dad got on his case after our all-nighter. Kennedy Ta'amu told Caleb it was time to get a life. Play a sport. Volunteer at church. Get a job. So now he's working a couple nights as a dishwasher at Vince's Pizza.

The bus winds its way north. Up Pac Highway. Past Sea-Tac Airport. Onto 405, then I-5. Into Seattle. The U District. The University of Washington campus.

I hop off at the Husky Union Building — the HUB — a brick, ivy-covered, dry place to kill some time.

I pull open the old wooden doors, walk past a bike shop, past a little branch of University Book Store, into a big open corridor. College kids lounge at tables and couches. They flirt. Surf the web. Read important novels. Argue about important things.

I head over to a newsstand to grab a Coke. I pay the lady and turn to go. No big deal.

But I almost bump into the girl behind me cuz she's on one knee tying her laces. She's got this shiny, dark brown hair hanging down so I can't see her face, but I got a feeling she might be cute and I want to find out.

So I fake sneeze.

The girl springs to her feet. "Do everyone a favor and cover that stuff up."

All I've got are uh s and um s because she is, in fact, kind of cute. Cute cheeks. Cute scowl as she stands there with cute brown eyes staring at me through long lashes and black dork glasses.

"Sorry about that," I say as I walk away fast.

"You wait, mister." She grabs me by the arm and examines my face.

And I'm like, "What?"

And she's like, "Your momma taught you better than that."

"Excuse me? My momma ?"

"Yeah. She taught you better."

"Leave my momma outta this cuz you don't know my momma."

Then she slips a bit of a wicked smile. "I think maybe I know your mamá."

I can't help but slip some of my smile and say, "How you think you know my mamá?"

And she says — her smile growing bigger — "Summers in Florence, Oregon. My great-uncle Frank's place."

I'm frozen stupid as time and space mess with my head.

This is Wendy Martinez, Frank O'Brien's grandniece.

But the Wendy Martinez from way-back summers was not cute. She was a bossy little busybody who chased me around and drove me nuts and — I'll admit it — I was a tiny bit scared of the little Wendy.

"You had better manners back then," she says. She busts out a full-on smile. "Teodoro Avila! Dude! Hug it out!"

We go in for the hug. Wrap arms like people do and ...

This hug. It's like firm? But soft and warm.

I turn to jelly in Wendy's arms as she squeezes tighter and my mind — everything fades and this is all there is. Me wrapped around Wendy. Wendy wrapped around me.

Then both of us — at the same exact time — inhale deep and fast and look big eyes right into each other.

That breath, those eyes — it's all way too much. So we let go and step back.

"My mom's at the bookstore," she says. "You have a second to talk?"

"I have lots of seconds," I say. But I'm thinking, I got the rest of my life, Wendy Martinez.

We find a bright spot in the atrium. We sit across a table from each other. Smile some nervous smiles. Then Wendy asks me about the family.

I tell her to go first.

Wendy says she and her mom still live a couple hours away in Vancouver, across the river from Portland. She's here at the University of Washington looking into a scholarship for women in science. She says this is the place to study health care. She's thinking about med school already. Wendy's got all the data and all her stuff one hundred percent together.

Before I know it, she asks me what I'm doing here.

I start telling Wendy about staying away from game night, but that feels way too complicated. So I sneeze again — I cover up this time — and I tell her that I am also here checking out the University of Washington, only I call it U-Dub so she knows I know people call it that.

And I say it with a straight face. As if I believed they would let me into the University of Washington. For actual college.

That's the first of my lies as I try to convince beautiful and brilliant Wendy Martinez that my parents are doing great. Xochitl's got a great music career going and she's doing awesome in art school. And I'm carefully considering my many college options before making my decision.

The thing about Wendy — besides her smile, her hair, her not-skinny curves, and those smart-girl glasses — is she is so full of caring. Like when the subject of Manny comes up and I tell her how bad I miss him. How scared I am he might never come back. Wendy looks me in the eyes as I talk. Touches my hand to make a point. Asks me if I'm okay — like really okay.

And when a stupid tear slips when I say I miss him, she acts like it's nothing. She just reaches over and wipes it away with a finger midsentence and says she can't imagine how stressful the waiting must be. How difficult it must be on all of us that Manny keeps getting redeployed. How much she hopes he makes it back.

When people try to make us feel better about Manny, they say, Everything's going to be okay. God has a plan. Everything happens for a reason.

Wendy doesn't say any of that BS. She gets that it's way more complicated. And that makes me like her even more.

In a minute, Wendy's mom walks our way. Rebecca O'Brien acts thrilled to see me. She asks how the family is and I keep my lies straight as Wendy takes off running. We watch her go and I'm about to ask, but Rebecca sighs and says, "You never know with that girl."

Rebecca tells me Uncle Frank misses us terribly. She says it'd be great if we all spent a week in Florence, like old times. I tell her I'll let Mami and Papi know.

Pretty soon, Wendy's standing there again, one hand hidden behind her back.

Rebecca edges away and it's clear they have to go.

I don't want this moment to end, so I say, "Wendy, being here, soaking this place in, I think this old U-Dub might be tops on my list."

"That's awesome," she says. "It'd be great if we both went here."

Then I totally lose it and I tell Wendy if she comes here, I'm coming here.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt and Co. (BYR) (September 18, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1627797416
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1627797412
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 - 18 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ HL550L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 7 - 9
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.69 x 1.17 x 8.43 inches
• #406 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Depression & Mental Health (Books)
• #1,295 in Teen & Young Adult Coming of Age Fiction
• #142,183 in Children's Books (Books)

About the author

Patrick flores-scott.

Patrick Flores-Scott was, until recently, a long-time public school teacher in Seattle, Washington. He’s now a stay-at-home dad and early morning writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Patrick’s first novel, Jumped In, has been named to the 2014 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults list, an NCSS/CBC Notable Book for the Social Studies, a Bank Street College Best Books of 2014 list and one of five finalists for the National Council for the Teachers of English Walden Award for YA Book of the Year for 2014.He is currently working on his second book, American Road Trip.

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The Last American Road Trip

By sarah kendzior, you must sign in to see if this title is available for request. sign in or register now, send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., pub date apr 01 2025 | archive date may 01 2025, flatiron books, biographies & memoirs | history | politics & current affairs, description.

The New York Times bestselling author of They Knew, Hiding in Plain Sight, and The View from Flyover Country navigates a changing America as she and her family embark on a series of road trips, in a book that is part memoir, part history, and wholly unique. It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland -- and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road -- again and again. Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events – the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic – reshape American life. They explore Route 66, national parks, historical sites, and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland. Together, the family watches the landscape of the United States - physical, environmental, social, political -transform through the car window. Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future – even though at times she struggles to believe it herself.

The New York Times bestselling author of They Knew, Hiding in Plain Sight, and The View from Flyover Country navigates a changing America as she and her family embark on a series of road trips, in a...

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• Feb 21, 2021
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The Dyatlov Pass Incident

What is the Dyatlov Pass incident? Well, as we’ll find out, it was when nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains between February 1st & 2nd in 1959, under supposed uncertain circumstances. The experienced trekking group, who were all from the Ural Polytechnical Institute , had established a camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl , in an area now named in honour of the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov. During the night, something caused them to cut their way out of their tent and attempt to flee the campsite while not being dressed for the heavy ass snowfall and subzero temperatures. Subzero was one of my favorite Mortal Kombat characters… god I loved that game.

After the group's bodies were grusomly discovered, an investigation by Soviet authorities determined that six of them had died from hypothermia while the other three had been killed by physical trauma . One victim actually had major skull damage, two had severe chest trauma, and another had a small crack in the skull . Was all of this caused by an avalanche or from something nefarious? Four of the bodies were found lying in running water in a creek, and three of these had soft tissue damage of the head and face – two of the bodies were missing their eyes, one was missing its tongue, and one was missing its eyebrows. It’s eyebrows! The Soviet investigation concluded that a "compelling natural force" had caused the untimely deaths. Numerous theories have been brought forward to account for the unexplained deaths, including animal attacks, hypothermia, avalanche , katabatic winds , infrasound -induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these. We’ll discuss all these in further detail later on.

Recently, Russia has opened a new investigation into the Dyatlov incident in 2019, and its conclusions were presented in July 2020: Simply put, they believe that an avalanche had led to the deaths of the hikers. Survivors of the avalanche had been forced to suddenly leave their camp in low visibility conditions with inadequate clothing, and had died of hypothermia. Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the regional prosecutor's office, said: "It was a heroic struggle. There was no panic. But they had no chance to save themselves under the circumstances." A study published in 2021 suggested that a type of avalanche known as a slab avalanche could explain some of the injuries. However, we’ll run through everything and you can come to your own conclusion.

Ok, let’s dive into the details of the event.

In 1959, the group was formed for a skiing expedition across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union. According to Prosecutor Tempalov, documents that were found in the tent of the expedition suggest that the expedition was named for the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was possibly dispatched by the local Komsomol organisation.Which was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union , which was sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute; now Ural Federal University, was the leader who assembled a group of nine others for the trip, most of whom were fellow students and peers at the university.Ok, so they were mostly students. Each member of the group, which consisted of eight men and two women, was an experienced Grade II-hiker with ski tour experience, and would be receiving Grade III certification upon their return. So, this trekk was like a test. I hated tests. Especially ones that could KILL YOU! At the time, this was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union, and required candidates to traverse 190 mi. The route was designed by Igor Dyatlov's group in order to reach the far northern regions of Sverdlovsk Oblast and the upper-streams of the Lozva river. The route was approved by the Sverdlovsk city route commission, which was a division of the Sverdlovsk Committee of Physical Culture and Sport. They approved of and confirmed the group of 10 people on January 8th, 1959. The goal of the expedition was to reach Otorten, a mountain(6.2 mi north of the site where the incident took place. This path, taken in February, was estimated as a Category III, the most difficult time to traverse.

On January 23rd, 1959 the Dyatlov group was issued their route book which listed their course as following the No.5 trail. At that time, the Sverdlovsk City Committee of Physical Culture and Sport listed approval for 11 people. The 11th person was listed as Semyon Zolotaryov who was previously certified to go with another expedition of similar difficulty (that was the Sogrin expedition group). The Dyatlov group left the Sverdlovsk city (today called Yekaterinburg) on the same day they received the route book.

The members of the group were Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov, Yuri Nikolayevich Doroshenko, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Dubinina, Georgiy (Yuri) Alexeyevich Krivonischenko, Alexander Sergeyevich Kolevatov, Zinaida Alekseevna Kolmogorova, Rustem Vladimirovich Slobodin, Nikolai Vladimirovich Thibeaux-Brignolles, Semyon (Alexander) Alekseevich Zolotaryov, and Yuri Yefimovich Yudin

The group arrived by train at Ivdel , a town at the centre of the northern province of Sverdlovsk Oblast in the early morning hours of January 25, 1959. They took a truck to Vizhai, a little village that is the last inhabited settlement to the north. As of 2010, only 207 really, really fucking cold people lived there. While spending the night in Vizhai, and probably freezing their baguettes off, the skiers purchased and ate loaves of bread to keep their energy levels up for the following day's hike.

On January 27, they began their trek toward Gora Otorten. On January 28, one member, Yuri Yudin, who suffered from several health ailments (including rheumatism and a congenital heart defect ) turned back due to knee and joint pain that made him unable to continue the hike. The remaining nine hikers continued the trek. Ok, my first question with this is, why in the fuck was that guy there, to begin with??

Diaries and cameras found around their last campsite made it possible to track the group's route up to the day before the incident. On January 31st, the group arrived at the edge of a highland area and began to prepare for climbing. In a wooded valley, they rounded up surplus food and equipment that they would use for the trip back. The next day, the hikers started to move through the pass. It seems they planned to get over the pass and make camp for the next night on the opposite side, but because of worsening weather conditions—like snowstorms, decreasing visibility... large piles of yeti shit—they lost their direction and headed west, toward the top of Kholat Syakhl . When they realised their mistake, the group decided to set up camp there on the slope of the mountain, rather than move almost a mile downhill to a forested area that would have offered some shelter from the weather. Yudin, the debilitated goofball that shouldn’t have even been there speculated, "Dyatlov probably did not want to lose the altitude they had gained, or he decided to practice camping on the mountain slope."

Before leaving, Captain Dyatlov had agreed he would send a telegram to their sports club as soon as the group returned to teeny, tiny Vizhai. It was expected that this would happen no later than February 12th, but Dyatlov had told Yudin, before he departed from the group, that he expected it to actually be longer. When the 12th passed and no messages had been received, there was no immediate reaction because, ya know… fuck it. Just kidding, these types of delays were actually common with such expeditions. On February 20th, the travellers' worried relatives demanded a rescue operation and the head of the institute sent the first rescue groups, consisting of volunteer students and teachers. Later, the army and militsiya forces (aka the Soviet police) became involved, with planes and helicopters ordered to join in on the search party.

On February 26th, the searchers found the group's abandoned and super fucked up tent on Kholat Syakhl . The campsite undoubtedly baffled the search party. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said “HOLY SHIT! THIS PLACE IS FUCKED UP!”... No, that’s not true. He actually said, "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind." Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside. Which seems like a serious and quick escape route was needed. Nine sets of footprints, left by people wearing only socks or a single shoe or even barefoot, could actually be followed, leading down to the edge of a nearby wood, on the opposite side of the pass, about a mile to the north-east. After approximately 1,600 ft, these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large Siberian pine , the searchers found the visible remains of a small fire. There were the first two bodies, those of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, shoeless and dressed only in their tighty whiteys. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, maybe the camp. Between the pine and the camp, the searchers found three more corpses: Dyatlov, Kolmogorova, and Slobodin, who died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent. They were found at distances of 980, 1,570, and 2,070 ft from the tree.

Finding the remaining four travellers took more than two frigging months. They were finally found on May 4th under 13 ft of snow in a ravine 246 ft further into the woods from the pine tree. Three of the four were better dressed than the others, and there were signs that some clothing of those who had died first had been taken off of their corpses for use by the others. Dubinina was wearing Krivonishenko's burned, torn trousers, and her left foot and shin were wrapped in a torn jacket.

Let’s get into the investigation. A legal inquest started immediately after the first five bodies were found. A medical examination found no injuries that might have led to their deaths, and it was concluded that they had all died of hypothermia .Which would make sense because it was colder than a polar bear’s butthole. Slobodin had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.

An examination of the four bodies found in May shifted the overall narrative of what they initially believed transpired. Three of the hikers had fatal injuries: Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage, and Dubinina and Zolotaryov had major chest fractures. According to Boris Vozrozhdenny, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, comparable to that of a car crash.Also, the bodies had no external wounds associated with the bone fractures, as if they had been subjected to a high level of pressure.

All four bodies found at the bottom of the creek in a running stream of water had soft tissue damage to their head and face. For example, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue and a fragment of her skullbone, while Zolotaryov was missing his friggin eyeballs, and Aleksander Kolevatov his eyebrows. V. A. Vozrozhdenny, the forensic expert performing the post-mortem examination , judged that these injuries happened after they had died, due to the location of the bodies in a stream.

At first, there was speculation that the indigenous Mansi people , who were just simple reindeer herders local to the area, had attacked and murdered the group for making fun of Rudolph. Several Mansi were interrogated, but the investigation indicated that the nature of the deaths did not support this hypothesis: only the hikers' footprints were visible, and they showed no sign of hand-to-hand struggle. Oh, I was kidding about the Rudolph thing. They thought they attacked the hikers for being on their land.

Although the temperature was very low, around −13 to −22 °F with a storm blowing, the dead were only partially dressed, as I mentioned.

Journalists reporting on the available parts of the inquest files claim that it states:

Six of the group members died of hypothermia and three of fatal injuries.

There were no indications of other people nearby on Kholat Syakhl apart from the nine travellers.

The tent had been ripped open from within.

The victims had died six to eight hours after their last meal.

Traces from the camp showed that all group members left the campsite of their own accord, on foot.

Some levels of radiation were found on one victim's clothing.

To dispel the theory of an attack by the indigenous Mansi people, Vozrozhdenny stated that the fatal injuries of the three bodies could not have been caused by human beings, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged".

Released documents contained no information about the condition of the skiers' internal organs.

And most obviously, There were no survivors.

At the time, the official conclusion was that the group members had died because of a compelling natural force.The inquest officially ceased in May 1959 as a result of the absence of a guilty party. The files were sent to a secret archive.

In 1997, it was revealed that the negatives from Krivonischenko's camera were kept in the private archive of one of the investigators, Lev Ivanov. The film material was donated by Ivanov's daughter to the Dyatlov Foundation. The diaries of the hiking party fell into Russia's public domain in 2009.

On April 12th, 2018, Zolotarev's remains were exhumed on the initiative of journalists of the Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda . Contradictory results were obtained: one of the experts said that the character of the injuries resembled a person knocked down by a car, and the DNA analysis did not reveal any similarity to the DNA of living relatives. In addition, it turned out that Zolotarev's name was not on the list of those buried at the Ivanovskoye cemetery. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the face from the exhumed skull matched postwar photographs of Zolotarev, although journalists expressed suspicions that another person was hiding under Zolotarev's name after World War II .

In February 2019, Russian authorities reopened the investigation into the incident, yet again, although only three possible explanations were being considered: an avalanche, a slab avalanche , or a hurricane . The possibility of a crime had been discounted.

Other reports brought about a whole bunch of additional speculation.

Twelve-year-old Yury Kuntsevich, who later became the head of the Yekaterinburg-based Dyatlov Foundation, attended five of the hikers' funerals. He recalled that their skin had a "deep brown tan".

Another group of hikers 31 mi south of the incident reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the sky to the north on the night of the incident.Similar spheres were observed in Ivdel and other areas continually during the period from February to March of 1959, by various independent witnesses (including the meteorology service and the military). These sightings were not noted in the 1959 investigation, and the various witnesses came forward years later.

After the initial investigation,

Anatoly Gushchin summarized his research in the book The Price of State Secrets Is Nine Lives. Some researchers criticised the work for its concentration on the speculative theory of a Soviet secret weapon experiment, but its publication led to public discussion, stimulated by interest in the paranormal .It is true that many of those who had remained silent for thirty years reported new facts about the accident. One of them was the former police officer, Lev Ivanov, who led the official inquest in 1959. In 1990, he published an article that included his admission that the investigation team had no rational explanation for the incident. He also stated that, after his team reported that they had seen flying spheres, he then received direct orders from high-ranking regional officials to dismiss this claim.

In 2000, a regional television company produced the documentary film The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass . With the help of the film crew, a Yekaterinburg writer, Anna Matveyeva, published a docudrama of the same name. A large part of the book includes broad quotations from the official case, diaries of victims, interviews with searchers and other documentaries collected by the film-makers. The narrative line of the book details the everyday life and thoughts of a modern woman (an alter ego of the author herself, which is super weird) who attempts to resolve the case. Despite its fictional narrative, Matveyeva's book remains the largest source of documentary materials ever made available to the public regarding the incident. Also, the pages of the case files and other documentaries (in photocopies and transcripts) are gradually being published on a web forum for nerds just like you and i!.

The Dyatlov Foundation was founded in 1999 at Yekaterinburg, with the help of Ural State Technical University, led by Yuri Kuntsevitch. The foundation's stated aim is to continue investigation of the case and to maintain the Dyatlov Museum to preserve the memory of the dead hikers. On July 1st 2016, a memorial plaque was inaugurated in Solikamsk in Ural's Perm Region, dedicated to Yuri Yudin (the dude who pussed out and is the sole survivor of the expedition group), who died in 2013.

Now, let’s go over some of the theories of what actually took place at the pass.

On July 11 2020, Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the Urals Federal District directorate of the Prosecutor-General 's Office, announced an avalanche to be the "official cause of death" for the Dyatlov group in 1959. Later independent computer simulation and analysis by Swiss researchers also suggest avalanche as the cause.

Reviewing the sensationalist " Yeti " hypothesis , American skeptic author Benjamin Radford suggests an avalanche as more plausible:

“that the group woke up in a panic (...) and cut their way out the tent either because an avalanche had covered the entrance to their tent or because they were scared that an avalanche was imminent (...) (better to have a potentially repairable slit in a tent than risk being buried alive in it under tons of snow). They were poorly clothed because they had been sleeping, and ran to the safety of the nearby woods where trees would help slow oncoming snow. In the darkness of night, they got separated into two or three groups; one group made a fire (hence the burned hands) while the others tried to return to the tent to recover their clothing since the danger had passed. But it was too cold, and they all froze to death before they could locate their tent in the darkness. At some point, some of the clothes may have been recovered or swapped from the dead, but at any rate, the group of four whose bodies was most severely damaged were caught in an avalanche and buried under 4 meters (13 ft) of snow (more than enough to account for the 'compelling natural force' the medical examiner described). Dubinina's tongue was likely removed by scavengers and ordinary predation.”

Evidence contradicting the avalanche theory includes:

The location of the incident did not have any obvious signs of an avalanche having taken place. An avalanche would have left certain patterns and debris distributed over a wide area. The bodies found within a month of the event were covered with a very shallow layer of snow and, had there been an avalanche of sufficient strength to sweep away the second party, these bodies would have been swept away as well; this would have caused more serious and different injuries in the process and would have damaged the tree line.

Over 100 expeditions to the region had been held since the incident, and none of them ever reported conditions that might create an avalanche. A study of the area using up-to-date terrain-related physics revealed that the location was entirely unlikely for such an avalanche to have occurred. The "dangerous conditions" found in another nearby area (which had significantly steeper slopes and cornices) were observed in April and May when the snowfalls of winter were melting. During February, when the incident occurred, there were no such conditions.

An analysis of the terrain and the slope showed that even if there could have been a very specific avalanche that found its way into the area, its path would have gone past the tent. The tent had collapsed from the side but not in a horizontal direction.

Dyatlov was an experienced skier and the much older Zolotaryov was studying for his Masters Certificate in ski instruction and mountain hiking. Neither of these two men would have been likely to camp anywhere in the path of a potential avalanche.

Footprint patterns leading away from the tent were inconsistent with someone, let alone a group of nine people, running in panic from either real or imagined danger. All the footprints leading away from the tent and towards the woods were consistent with individuals who were walking at a normal pace.

Repeated 2015 investigation [ edit ]

A review of the 1959 investigation's evidence completed in 2015–2019 by experienced investigators from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) on request of the families confirmed the avalanche with several important details added. First of all, the ICRF investigators (one of them an experienced alpinist ) confirmed that the weather on the night of the tragedy was very harsh, with wind speeds up to hurricane force,(45–67 mph, a snowstorm and temperatures reaching −40 °C. These factors weren't considered by the 1959 investigators who arrived at the scene of the accident three weeks later when the weather had much improved and any remains of the snow slide had settled and been covered with fresh snowfall. The harsh weather at the same time played a critical role in the events of the tragic night, which have been reconstructed as follows:

On 1 February the group arrives at the Kholat Syakhl mountain and erects a large, 9-person tent on an open slope, without any natural barriers such as forests. On the day and a few preceding days, a heavy snowfall continued, with strong wind and frost.

The group traversing the slope and digging a tent site into the snow weakens the snow base. During the night the snowfield above the tent starts to slide down slowly under the weight of the new snow, gradually pushing on the tent fabric, starting from the entrance. The group wakes up and starts evacuation in panic, with only some able to put on warm clothes. With the entrance blocked, the group escapes through a hole cut in the tent fabric and descends the slope to find a place perceived as safe from the avalanche only 1500 m down, at the forest border.

Because some of the members have only incomplete clothing, the group splits. Two of the group, only in their underwear and pajamas, were found at the Siberian pine tree, near a fire pit. Their bodies were found first and confirmed to have died from hypothermia.

Three hikers, including Dyatlov, attempted to climb back to the tent, possibly to get sleeping bags. They had better clothes than those at the fire pit, but still quite light and with inadequate footwear. Their bodies were found at various distances 300–600 m from the campfire, in poses suggesting that they had fallen exhausted while trying to climb in deep snow in extremely cold weather.

The remaining four, equipped with warm clothing and footwear, were trying to find or build a better camping place in the forest further down the slope. Their bodies were found 70 m from the fireplace, under several meters of snow and with traumas indicating that they had fallen into a snow hole formed above a stream. These bodies were found only after two months.

According to the ICRF investigators, the factors contributing to the tragedy were extremely bad weather and lack of experience of the group leader in such conditions, which led to the selection of a dangerous camping place. After the snow slide, another mistake of the group was to split up, rather than building a temporary camp down in the forest and trying to survive through the night. Negligence of the 1959 investigators contributed to their report creating more questions than answers and inspiring numerous conspiracy theories.

In 2021 a team of physicists and engineers led by Alexander Puzrin published a new model that demonstrated how even a relatively small slide of snow slab on the Kholat Syakhl slope could cause tent damage and injuries consistent with those suffered by Dyatlov team.

Ok, what about the Katabatic wind that I mentioned earlier?

In 2019, a Swedish-Russian expedition was made to the site, and after investigations, they proposed that a violent katabatic wind was a plausible explanation for the incident. Katabatic winds are a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. They are somewhat rare events and can be extremely violent. They were implicated in a 1978 case at Anaris Mountain in Sweden, where eight hikers were killed and one was severely injured in the aftermath of katabatic wind. The topography of these locations were noted to be very similar according to the expedition.

A sudden katabatic wind would have made it impossible to remain in the tent, and the most rational course of action would have been for the hikers to cover the tent with snow and seek shelter behind the treeline. On top of the tent, there was also a torch left turned on, possibly left there intentionally so that the hikers could find their way back to the tent once the winds subsided. The expedition proposed that the group of hikers constructed two bivouac shelters , or just makeshift shelters, one of which collapsed, leaving four of the hikers buried with the severe injuries observed.

Another hypothesis popularised by Donnie Eichar 's 2013 book Dead Mountain is that wind going around Kholat Syakal created a Kármán vortex street , a repeating pattern of swirling vortices , caused by a process known as vortex shedding , which is responsible for the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid around blunt bodies. which can produce infrasound capable of inducing panic attacks in humans. According to Eichar's theory, the infrasound generated by the wind as it passed over the top of the Holatchahl mountain was responsible for causing physical discomfort and mental distress in the hikers. Eichar claims that, because of their panic, the hikers were driven to leave the tent by whatever means necessary, and fled down the slope. By the time they were further down the hill, they would have been out of the infrasound's path and would have regained their composure, but in the darkness would have been unable to return to their shelter. The traumatic injuries suffered by three of the victims were the result of their stumbling over the edge of a ravine in the darkness and landing on the rocks at the bottom. Hmmm...plausible.

Military tests

In another theory, the campsite fell within the path of a Soviet parachute mine exercise. This theory alleges that the hikers, woken up by loud explosions, fled the tent in a shoeless panic and found themselves unable to return for their shit. After some members froze to death attempting to endure the bombardment, others commandeered their clothing only to be fatally injured by subsequent parachute mine concussions. There are in fact records of parachute mines being tested by the Soviet military in the area around the time the hikers were out there, fuckin’ around. Parachute mines detonate while still in the air rather than upon striking the Earth's surface and produce signature injuries similar to those experienced by the hikers: heavy internal damage with relatively little external trauma. The theory coincides with reported sightings of glowing, orange orbs floating or falling in the sky within the general vicinity of the hikers and allegedly photographed by them, potentially military aircraft or descending parachute mines. (remember the camera they found? HUH? Yeah?)

This theory (among others) uses scavenging animals to explain Dubinina's injuries. Some speculate that the bodies were unnaturally manipulated, on the basis of characteristic livor mortis markings discovered during an autopsy, as well as burns to hair and skin. Photographs of the tent allegedly show that it was erected incorrectly, something the experienced hikers were unlikely to have done.

A similar theory alleges the testing of radiological weapons and is based partly on the discovery of radioactivity on some of the clothing as well as the descriptions of the bodies by relatives as having orange skin and grey hair. However, radioactive dispersal would have affected all, not just some, of the hikers and equipment, and the skin and hair discoloration can be explained by a natural process of mummification after three months of exposure to the cold and wind. The initial suppression by Soviet authorities of files describing the group's disappearance is sometimes mentioned as evidence of a cover-up, but the concealment of information about domestic incidents was standard procedure in the USSR and thus nothing strange.. And by the late 1980s, all Dyatlov files had been released in some manner.

Let’s talk about Paradoxical undressing

International Science Times proposed that the hikers' deaths were caused by hypothermia, which can induce a behavior known as paradoxical undressing in which hypothermic subjects remove their clothes in response to perceived feelings of burning warmth. It is undisputed that six of the nine hikers died of hypothermia. However, others in the group appear to have acquired additional clothing (from those who had already died), which suggests that they were of a sound enough mind to try to add layers.

Keith McCloskey, who has researched the incident for many years and has appeared in several TV documentaries on the subject, traveled to the Dyatlov Pass in 2015 with Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Foundation and a group. At the Dyatlov Pass he noted:

There were wide discrepancies in distances quoted between the two possible locations of the snow shelter where Dubinina, Kolevatov, Zolotarev, and Thibault-Brignolles were found. One location was approximately 80 to 100 meters from the pine tree where the bodies of Doroshenko and Krivonischenko were found and the other suggested location was so close to the tree that anyone in the snow shelter could have spoken to those at the tree without raising their voices to be heard. This second location also has a rock in the stream where Dubinina's body was found and is the more likely location of the two. However, the second suggested location of the two has a topography that is closer to the photos taken at the time of the search in 1959.

The location of the tent near the ridge was found to be too close to the spur of the ridge for any significant build-up of snow to cause an avalanche. Furthermore, the prevailing wind blowing over the ridge had the effect of blowing snow away from the edge of the ridge on the side where the tent was. This further reduced any build-up of snow to cause an avalanche. This aspect of the lack of snow on the top and near the top of the ridge was pointed out by Sergey Sogrin in 2010.

McCloskey also noted:

Lev Ivanov's boss, Evgeny Okishev (Deputy Head of the Investigative Department of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Prosecution Office), was still alive in 2015 and had given an interview to former Kemerovo prosecutor Leonid Proshkin in which Okishev stated that he was arranging another trip to the Pass to fully investigate the strange deaths of the last four bodies when Deputy Prosecutor General Urakov arrived from Moscow and ordered the case shut down.

Evgeny Okishev also stated in his interview with Leonid Proshkin that Klinov, head of the Sverdlovsk Prosecutor's Office, was present at the first post mortems in the morgue and spent three days there, something Okishev regarded as highly unusual and the only time, in his experience, it had happened.

Donnie Eichar , who investigated and made a documentary about the incident, evaluated several other theories that are deemed unlikely or have been discredited:

They were attacked by Mansi or other local tribesmen. The local tribesmen were known to be peaceful and there was no track evidence of anyone approaching the tent.

They were attacked and chased by animal wildlife. There were no animal tracks and the group would not have abandoned the relative security of the tent.

High winds blew one member away, and the others attempted to rescue the person. A large experienced group would not have behaved like that, and winds strong enough to blow away people with such force would have also blown away the tent.

An argument, possibly related to a romantic encounter that left some of them only partially clothed, led to a violent dispute. About this, Eichar states that it is "highly implausible. By all indications, the group was largely harmonious, and sexual tension was confined to platonic flirtation and crushes. There were no drugs present and the only alcohol was a small flask of medicinal alcohol, found intact at the scene. The group had even sworn off cigarettes for the expedition." Furthermore, a fight could not have left the massive injuries that one body had suffered.

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Sounds awful about who died in this story