Loneliness

After hours of driving through forests, just north of Susanville the landscape opens and shows these wide wide valleys, surrounded in the distance by brown mountains. (see extra) The extensions of these valleys is so immense that I sometimes think that Manhattan easily fits into them.
(picture is bad because I took it while driving and through a dirty window).
And then , while driving east, you pass some tiny settlements, some cattle ranches (see second extra) and occasionally a really nice house as the one in the picture. Some of them have been nice a long time ago, a little church is only a ruin, but it gives you an impression of how life has been in this loneliness.