High plains?

**Note -- I'll be uploading photos when I can, as the last couple places we've stayed at practice internet throttling. Those who know me know how impatient I can be -- I have no time to wait 10 minutes for one photo to upload. I hope you, my readers, are more patient that I am! When I get them uploaded, I'll add links to this post, and a couple photos.

Over the past few days, we've traveled from Grand Island, Nebraska to Ogden, Utah. The trip from Grand Island to Rawlins was long -- almost nine hours on the road. The combination of nasty winds from the southwest, and a long uphill climb made for a very long day, and very poor gas mileage!

The weather has changed considerably too. The humidity we encountered in Omaha and points east is gone. While that makes heat easier to bear, it does nothing for my sinuses. I know I'm strange, but I find it easier to breathe in humid climes than in our naturally dry climate of the West.

It felt weird to be going across the Continental Divide without huge mountains all around. The divide in Wyoming actually happens in two places because the Great Divide Basin is in the middle. It's actually at about 7000 ft above sea level, but if you were just dropped into Rawlins and told to drive west on I-80, you wouldn't really notice that you were more or less in the middle of the Rocky Mountains...sorta. When I cross the Divide at home, it's usually at Sunshine Village Ski Resort where the Divide chair actually crosses into British Columbia and back into Alberta before reaching the top.

The landscape really is stunning, even if it does seem to go on forever...well, until it hits what you can see of the mountains in the distance. There has been, or still is, a significant amount of oil/gas activity in the area. I took pictures of pumpjacks, oil batteries, and compressor stations along the way. But at the same time, there were a couple huge wind farms! The many windmills looked like an army, all standing at attention facing into the southwest wind, ready to snare the invisible energy. In one case, I was able to snap a picture of a windfarm with an pumpjack in front. A tale of two energies....

Right around where we crossed into Utah, the landscape changed again. Gone was the high plains, and here was the winding roads through the passes in the mountains, and the long up- and downhill grades to get through those passes. The rock is not the same as the granite we're used to seeing in the Canadian Rockies. Here it's red, and worn in interesting ways, almost looking like desert hoodoos, except it just goes on and on as a wall of rock with hidden valleys that snake away from the roadways.

Travel through one more pass, and there we are, in Ogden. We were early enough in the day to thoroughly enjoy sitting under the awning on a warm afternoon, with a gentle breeze keeping the worst of the 30ish temperatures at bay. A nice swim in the pool in the evening, followed by a spell in the hottub (I want one!), and then to sleep, ready for the next phase of the trip to Caldwell, Idaho.