Yesterday I drove from North Platte, Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Utah. My original starting point was Charlotte, NC, and my destination is Reno, NV. It's just over 2,500 miles one-way and will have taken me four days to complete. (There's a reason for driving instead of flying, but that's about work and I never blog about work.)

Taking I-80 through Nebraska is not very exiting. Nebraska is rather flat, the road is rather straight, the scenery is mile after mile of irrigation rigs and the occasional old-fashioned windmill-powered well pump with a few cows standing around. Wyoming offers little improvement at first, but as you head west you begin to see more hills which roll higher and higher until the snow-streaked mountains come into view. By the time you reach Western Wyoming, every bend in the road, every vantage point over every hill is more awe-inspiring than the last. Following a thin ribbon of highway down into one valley, then up and out gives one an understanding of the phrase "wide-open spaces". I considered taking some pictures, but realized that my camera's lens would only flatten the image into a narrow slice of depth-less frame that could not possibly convey the awesomeness of the sight. It was a partly-cloudy day, cold, and large patches of snow were still on the ground. In some places massive snow drifts had become isolated and were slowly disappearing allong fences or in gullies. The whole world as far as I could see was blue and white sky, brown and green scruff, covered with large patches of white, mottled like a cow's hide. In the mid-afternoon sun, the high cirrus clouds and the lower, heavier clouds in the distance helped cast a cool, bluish-white glow on the entire landscape. It looked cold.

This road can be treacherous, but the wind was fairly calm yesterday, and the pavement was bone-dry. Over the top of one hill I came to the mangled remains of two tractor-trailers in the median. They were a couple of hundred yards apart, so they had probably met their doom separately, but recently. One had a crew trying to right the truck, which lay on it's side like a sick animal, and the other wreck was just the two trailers from a Fed-Ex double rig that had been emptied of its cargo. The trailers lay empty, ripped open with debris littering the ground around them. Probably victims of ice or wind, or both.

Eastern Utah has a different kind of landscape. The road is closely rimmed with tall bluffs and mountains that the highway weaves through. Coming down to Salt Lake City this way means facing a steep, winding downward grade for many miles.

The road ahead meanders all the way across Nevada to Reno. The forecast calls for the possibility of light snow.