What follows are a series of pictures that do as much justice to the landscape changes in Utah as a 2d medium can muster. Description is under each photo.
After the border with Colorado, the Rockies turn to brownish hills in Utah. ...
... and as you travel west, those hills get flatter and rockier, until ...
... suddenly you realize they are mesas, and they are getting more and more orange, but between the mesas ...
... is NOTHING! ... And when I say nothing, I mean NOTHING. Just huge open places with brown grasses, tiny shrubs, open range tumbleweeds (literally) and NO PEOPLE and NO GAS for miles and miles in this "Great Basin."
Some of the mesas are really quite GRAND!
... Then suddenly you notice the mesas aren't really flat anymore due to erosion ...
... they are MORE orange, and have these knobbly spikes on the top ...
And then the mesas become hills again and begin to get more "gray," for lack of a better word. They really contain many colors...
But from a distance they get more and more gray, and more and more flat until you realize that some of the changes in color are from SALT ... and the the flatness turns into ...
... The Salt Flats near Salt Lake City! This was surely the most surreal landscape we saw.
In the western part of Utah, the hills are more like dunes.
And now a word about the humidity. There is NONE. In fact, in the Great Basin by the mesas, the water feels like it's being sucked out of your skin in a dangerous way. In fact, I had a crust of bread in the car for an hour or so, and it turned into crunchy toast! There were times when I realized that, if the truck broke down, we really could die. But it didn't, and we were safe.
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