A trip into the wild, and a chance enounter with the visionary novelist’s closest living relation.

I book the cheapest Airbnb I can find in the California high desert: a metal shipping container in Yucca Valley with a Little House On The Prairie interior for $30 a night. As soon as I get there, I realise this was a terrible idea: boiling hot in the day, freezing cold at night. But it doesn’t matter, because the woman who greets me has these incredibly bright eyes set in a face that suggests she hasn’t spent her life watching daytime television in a La-Z-Boy armchair. There is something glittering about her. Mischief.

Read the full story here: The Lost Explorer