It wasn't the best room; wasn't the worst. But it was 45 bucks so I took it. I slept pretty well in my fancy extra-wide sleeping bag.
HEY EVERYBODY! NOTEBOOKS ARE ON SALE! Such is life in the run-down corners of the beehive state. I didn't buy any notebooks, but I did buy some veggies and some ice.
This is what you get, in Utah, when you point the camera at the side of the road and press the trigger.
This landscape inspired me to listen to some science fiction about Mars, so I poked through my audiobook collection and chose "Rainbow Mars" by Larry Niven, not really knowing what I was in for. Turns out it's more fantasy than science fiction - a pastiche of old characters and myths from stories inspired by Mars in the late 19th and 20th century, all crammed together into one time-bending plotline. It passed the day well enough, though I'd been hoping for something more realistic.
Top of the hill...
... Bottom of the hill!
And this is what you get, in Utah, when you point the camera at the other side of the car, without even bothering to roll down the window.
If they can call a mountain range the Grand Tetons, they can call this ... er, something similar.
Devil's Canyon! This was taken a short walk from a highway rest stop. When I got out of the car, I had to step around a wide blanket arrayed with "indian jewelry" and occupied by three vaguely Native-American people. They were set up directly beneath a large sign on a metal pole that read "NO SOLICITING, NO VENDING". Pretty brazen.
So many layers, stacked so high, and all of it shoved up into the atmosphere...
It's that last step that you gotta watch out for!
This was the most awe-inspiring thing I saw in all of Utah, believe it or not. The freeway swung around an S-curve and I was abruptly confronted with an entire landscape, mountains and all, pitched up on its side as though gravity itself had suddenly gone out of whack. It wasn't just a few rocks, or a single hill ... it was everything.
Looming!
A few hours later I passed into Colorado, which has its own collection of badlands topography to share! These are the Dillon Pinnacles, I believe, visible next to the Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado's largest body of water.
Pardon the moving-car blurriness. This looks like the decaying apparatus of a mine... Neat structure.
Lookin' up a tree with my touring shirt on! I also took another panorama in this part of the forest. Check out the 360-degree Quicktime view!
My first Colorado sunset. Lovely!
I must have been tired when I booked my place for the night - a tiny little cabin with electricity, no running water, and remarkably strong internet - because I accidentally locked my keys inside as I was leaving to find dinner. The manager had already gone to bed, so I had to pry the screen out of the porch window, then wiggle my way face-first through the window and onto the floor of the room. At least there weren't any bystanders around to point and laugh.
As I was walking out towards the restaurant the second time, I spied a big chunk of rose quartz embedded in the gravel of the parking lot, and pried it up with a stick. It made a fine gift to geologist Erika when I arrived in Boston.
