Doing Time - San Francisco
Three crime-free decades after doing time for armed robbery, Darwin E. Coon is back in prison - by choice.  Fortnightly he follows in the footsteps of some notorious men to chat and sell his story about being prisoner #1422 in the world’s best known jail...

Size Does Matter - Yosemite NP, California
You call that a rock?  This is a rock!  I can’t resist reworking Crocodile Dundee’s famous quote, for in front of me is no ordinary lump of stone.  More than a kilometre tall, El Capitan is one of the world’s largest granite monoliths.  Californian black oaks frame ant-sized climbers making slow progress up the face of this Yosemite National Park landmark...

On the Anasazi Trail - New Mexico
Thirty-something years ago, I played Cowboys and Indians with the boys from down the road, baying like a coyote as I fired imaginary bullets and arrows at each other.  I grew up watching feathered men ride pinto ponies across television screens in pursuit of scalps and return, triumphant, to squaws in painted tepees.  But centuries before the clashes that produced Hollywood's Wild West, native Americans were irrigating corn, beans and squash, and constructing monumental multistorey masonry buildings.  They were the Anasaz, and they occupied what is now the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet...

Silver City - Nevada
Smoke drifts from the cigar between his teeth, mixing with the hat-brim shadow that darkens the eyes watching me with a lawman’s steely gaze.  Then he grins, enjoying his acting role as U.S. marshal in a town where the most dangerous crime is jay walking.  But life (and crime) in this historic mining town has not always been so relaxed.  Back when the road into the Nevada Hills was dirt, when miners toiled by hand in hot, wet conditions 200m beneath below ground, and reporter Samuel Clemens first signed the pen name Mark Twain, Virginia City was a very different place...

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