KATHARINE Lee Bates got it exactly right when she wrote of the purple mountain majesties in her poem, composed atop Pike's Peak in the Rocky Mountains! The mountains are indeed breathtaking, although not without a bite -- in my case it was a bit of altitude sickness that aggravated my inner ear, triggering vertigo, and the fringes of a headache. Fortunately, the vertigo was easily dispatched with meclizine and the headache went away of its own accord when we got below 5,000 feet.
The terrain today was fierce and magnificent with I-70 crossing the Rockies at 10,000+ feet, then dropping slowly to 7,000 feet as we cruised the bare slopes of Vail and continued into a valley bowl, surrounded by high plateaus and desert. Paul kept his head on a swivel to capture as much as he could with his camera...
The myriad mountain views as we wound down the western slopes of the Rocky Mountain range.
The snowless slopes at Vail imitate an arachnid!
As we left the serious heights of the Rockies and Colorado behind and entered Utah, the scenery changed completely and we found ourselves in a sort of bowl-shaped valley surrounded by massive plateaus on three sides. We had distant views of the Canyonlands before leaving the barren wilderness for the busy cities of Provo and Salt Lake, finally stopping for the night in the town of Layton, just south of Ogden on I-15.
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| Paul proves he was there! |
Sometimes we went over, sometimes we went through!
Surrounded by plateaus in the eastern desert of Utah
A distant view of the Canyonlands to our south
We're headed through Idaho and into Oregon tomorrow after a night's rest at a better than average accommodation (Home2 by Hilton in Layton).
The view from our room and Mom relaxing after a day on mountain roads.
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