There are innumerable photography books and essays on the Western landscape. Originally, I set out to toss one more lovingly constructed entry onto the pile. This gallery was to serve as a rough maquette for a book on the Western Landscape containing highlights from two decades in Jackson Hole and road trips across the West.

But as I thought about my relationship to the region — to these pictures — I realized that while my camera may have captured landscapes, what captured me was something different. It wasn’t the landscape so much as e-scape. Let’s call it The Western Escape. Growing up in New England, my adult life spent in New York City and Washington, D.C., once I began devoting an increasing number of months each year Out West, I unconsciously began viewing its sublime vistas, those wide skies, and the spaces between its archipelago of small towns as nothing less than an escape from Back East.

In his writings on the West, Wallace Stegner identified an American inheritance that, in contrast to Europe’s, was at once too raw and too precious to be contained in museums, castles, or cathedrals. Instead, he wrote, ours lay in the folds of the mountains, in the cottonwoods delineating slow-moving rivers, in the falls of Yosemite and the multi-hued chasms of the Colorado Plateau.

For me, there has always been something far more spiritual in hiking the Tetons, or visiting each Western park and national monument, than genuflecting in a cathedral or jostling for a view of The Mona Lisa. As it must it have been for Theodore Roosevelt, arriving in the West has for me always been an escape from the stultifying order, the humidity and congestion, the Euclidean geometry of the Eastern Seaboard’s urban grids.

Edward Abbey wrote that rather than driving to the Canyon Country, you should “walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees.” I get that, even as I make my approach along the same highways he did. As a photographer, I have instinctively been drawn to Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis — wanting to capture what time, not man, has imposed on the landscape. Ansel Adams, not Robert Adams.

So, see the photographs here as vistas captured in two dimensions by a camera held by an East Coast escapee. Road trips and landscape photography are among the joys of living in the West. They force you ever onward, up early, out late, escaping into the light.