Make a Memory With Me: road tripping America’s wild southwest

My fascination with North America started young. After a few years living in Australia, my parents decided our family should take the “long way” home. We spent the summer holidays road tripping around California, Canada and New York. Since then, I’ve been back six times – five of them road trips. Each one has unintentionally marked a significant moment in my life, whether that’s the loss of a loved one or, most recently, a new job. Each time, I’ve immortalised my adventures in a photo book to share with those ones who joined me, and those who couldn’t.

Prior to joining Popsa, I embarked on a journey across an often overlooked part of the United States. Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona have the unique privilege of sharing the only place in the US where four state boundaries meet at a single point. That alone proved magical enough in my mind to warrant exploring the quiet hinterland of the southwest – a place where the iconic Western was born, where words fail to accurately describe the scale and grandeur of the land. And of course, it felt appropriate to turn my trip into a Popsa Photo Book.

The journey

I knew my starting point had to be Denver. The last time I’d visited was about a decade earlier, and it felt like an appropriate place to begin (not to mention the plentiful flight options from the UK). From there I headed south through Colorado Springs and Hartsel, staying in beautiful log cabins and clapboard farmhouses along the way. The food I gorged on ranged from delicious gnocchi in a ramshackle bistro run by third-generation Italians on the edge of a near-empty settlement, to cauliflower pizza made by ex-city bankers. I passed through landmarks like the Garden of the Gods with its towering red sandstone spires; Wilkerson Pass, where I surveyed the vast open plains of South Park; and Mesa Verde National Park, with the ancient dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans.

One stop that stands out in my mind was a large ranch north of Del Norte, where the cackling of coyotes terrorising cattle often kept me awake at night – but also where the sunrise left me entranced by the immensity of the sky as it climbed behind the distant Sangre de Cristo Range. The photos I took there remain some of my fondest and most beautiful of the whole trip.

The further west I headed, the more arid the landscape became. Verdant farmland gave way to crumbling buttes and tumbleweeds. The colours turned to rust and my car built up a thin coat of dust. I voyaged through film-set places like the Valley of the Gods and Monument Valley. Switching between portrait and landscape photos gave a completely different sense of scale to the surrounding sights. I could focus in on a tower of sandstone standing proudly, or broaden my view to entire plateaus looming over the valley floor.

The final major stop of my trip took me further west still, through the towns of Flagstaff and Williams, until I set my eyes upon the most memorable location of the road trip. It’s no surprise that Popsa found the Grand Canyon National Park to be the most photographed national park in the US in 2025. The zoom lens on my iPhone proved particularly helpful here, finding interesting twists and turns in this behemoth gorge. From there, I made my way through Zion National Park, where I lapped up the biblical scale of the walls of rock around me, before heading back to Las Vegas. It was time to go home. I couldn’t stop myself from beginning to plan the next trip on the flight back, my mind still captivated by this wild, wild west.

Turning the photos into a Popsa Photo Book

Like any road trip, I came back with more photos than I could ever use. Thousands of iPhone shots: sandstone, sunrises, ramshackle diners and a lot of near-identical valley vistas I couldn’t quite bring myself to delete. The thought of combing through it all to pick the best for printing was daunting.

Popsa’s new Memories feature did the first pass for me. It surfaced the standout shots from the trip, giving me a shortlist to work from rather than making me wade through the lot. The gnocchi made the cut. So did the ranch at sunrise.

From there, building the book was the easy part. I arranged the pages roughly in the order I’d travelled – Denver through to Vegas – so flicking through the finished book feels like retracing the route. I kept the layouts simple and let the big landscape shots fill the page where they earned it. A few taps later, the book was on its way.

The result

Flicking through the finished book is the closest I’ve come to getting back on the road. The small moments sit alongside the big ones – the food and the ranch at sunrise next to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, which is how the trip actually felt when I was there.

The cover features a wide open shot from the ranch. Of all the thousands of photos I took, it’s this one that holds the whole trip in it. Inside, one spread stops me every time: a single shot of a rock formation in Monument Valley alongside a much wider landscape shot of the valley itself. I didn’t realise the two belonged together until I saw them side by side.

What surprises me most is how often the sky shows up. There’s a scale to the sky in the US that’s hard to find back home. I notice it now in a way I didn’t at the time – how one photo after another is mostly sky, with the land pinned along the bottom edge. That’s the quiet thing a book like this does. You think you’re saving what you remember, but you also end up with a record of what you weren’t paying attention to.

The next trip is already half-planned. This book is what’s reminding me to organise the flights.