He thought he was through with the past,

but the past wasn't through with him.

When a rancher's losses become too great, he must take a journey into the West and into the past to reclaim what is rightfully his.

Synopsis: When rancher Martin Auden's wife leaves him, his tractor breaks down and his horse gets stolen, an (actual) nine-month drought, worse than had been experienced in over fifty years in the Southwest, sets in.  (And, during the shooting of the picture, the 125 year-old Ingenhuett store burned down in the Hill Country town of Comfort, Texas.)  The loss provided more of an impetus for the heartbreak in the opening sequences of the movie. The burned remains echo the shell of a man and the challenges he is up against. In the story, only a few items remain from the burned store ruins, including a handwritten journal from El Paso, 1886. When Martin meets his ex-wife Paula at a cafe to ask her to come home, she refuses but encourages him to go after the stolen horse, to not let anything else get away.  Out of complete frustration, Martin packs his bags to head to El Paso to follow the one lead he has. On one of his lonely evenings, he begins reading the old journal. His journey West takes on similarities of the story written in the journal, the story of John (John Dodson), a young man who meets Emily (Emily Willis), a young woman passionate about protecting the land from corrupt fortune seekers. In his quest, Martin meets Skye Morrow (Debbie French), a single woman desperate for the new life she thinks she may have found on land she has inherited. In her attempts at her new life, Skye has purchased Martin's stolen horse and set it free on her property. Skye gives Martin permission to search her land, the only condition being that she gets to go with him on foot into the 40,000 acres of badlands. On their treacherous journey, Martin and Skye spend their evenings reading the unfinished love story in the journal, only to discover new endings of their own.