First detour of the day was a fort built by the Mormons to protect the stagecoach route running through Utah from Indians. It is solidly constructed of volcanic rock carved from the surrounding hills, but was never actually attacked. It is also actually owned by Mormons, not by the state, and so the only way to see it is with a Mormon tour guide.
My guy was nice though, and he really only spent about 90 seconds of a 30 minute tour actively proselytizing. The rooms of the fort have been restored to period detail. This is the telegraph room; the equipment is powered by a homemade battery (the carboys under the desk).
As souvenirs I got a free carved wooden toy, a couple of freshly grown carrots, and a pamphlet on Joseph Smith.When you drive in Utah, you just run into scenery like this.
This particular stretch of I-70 contains the longest stretch of interstate without any services. The sign does not lie - for over 100 miles, there was no gas, food or electricity.
It did, however, have some wicked traffic due to a paving project.
It also had various places where you could pull off of the road to see the scenery. This was supposed to be a salt flat.
It's a Jeero tree!
There's my road, stretching into the blue sky.
This is another vista point. Some sort of big erosion.
A rare Totoro sighting in its natural habitat.
More erosion. So apparently, this part of Utah is sort of pushed up from the rest of Utah (wikipedia says "a giant dome-shaped anticline of sandstone, shale, and limestone that was pushed up millions of years ago") and ever since it was pushed up, running water has been cutting parts of it down.
It is a dramatic road to drive.
You may not have known this, but Utah is where Muffies come from.
And that's when my camera ran out of batteries. After that I hit Colorado and snaked up the Rockies, over the continental divide, and into Denver. There were lots of slopes, trees, and twisty roads, and at the top of the pass there was Eisenhower Tunnel, the highest vehicular tunnel in the world and the longest tunnel built under the Interstate program. However it all looked much like California - imagine driving up a Sierra Nevada pass (maybe the drive up to Tahoe) - so its okay that the camera died.
