Windy

So, it ended up being an adventure lasting some 34 hours in the car. A great long adventure, heavy on scenery, light on car problems, thankfully.

I left Seattle around 11:30AM on Saturday and went down to Portland, suffering the only traffic jam aside from coming into Chicago on a Monday morning. But it all cleared up rather quickly and it was a beautiful clear day. There I switched and got onto I-84.

Driving along in traffic, with the MAX train running alongside the road and a freight train of identical dark green tanker cars running alongside that, it all felt like an old vision of the future. Somehow we were all moving at more or less the same speed, making the traffic on the interstate seem more trainlike than usual and giving this notion of efficient, industrious society that rarely is blatent enough to hit me over the head that hard.

I-84 runs diagonal across the states of Oregon, Idaho, and terminates in Utah about an hour out of Salt Lake. And it is quite a scenic road. For one thing, just a few minutes outside of Portland it enters a relatively narrow valley through which the Columbia river flows. This is a monster river. I think the first time I saw it I though it must have been a lake, and then it just kept going all the way to Portland.

The feeling that it was somehow a giant lake is not without reason. Although it is a mighty river under its own merits, the Columbia valley is heavily dammed, providing most of the power for Washington, Oregon, and parts of Idaho as well. On the way through, I stopped by the original Bonneville dam, one of the first built along the Columbia by the WPA during the great depression.






It is a pretty impressive sight. And a pretty impressive site as well.

The dam was built in order to allow shipping up and down the Columbia valley, provide inexpensive electrical power to the surrounding areas, and, just as importantly, provide jobs for a great many people.

I find this sort of thing fascinating as all hell. Just the notion that people can do something like this. They've stopped a river, and transferred its energy to electricity. That big propeller looking thing is actually an old turbine that used to be in the dam. The portion of the dam in the top picture is not the generator portion, which actually looks just like a huge wall with a few windows at the top and a bunch of churning water at the bottom.

The dam is equipped with locks to let boats rise up to the level behind the dam and continue on their way as well as a fish ladder (which was under repair when I was there) which still allows the salmon to run even though there is this giant concrete barrier in their way.

Anyway, you can look up more if you like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Dam

After the pitstop (they have pretty nice bathrooms as well, including automatic sinks which run off of the ambient light in the room), I continued on the road through the Columbia valley, past a couple of other dams and several towns. The land grew gradually less green, as it does, but there wasn't any snow in eastern Oregon.

I-84 winds through several canyons as it goes along, and eastern Oregon has a pretty cool one. It's quite narrow, and feels very secluded. I don't know exactly how it is determined where to put the borders of a state, particularly western states which may not have their borders determined by a river or a treaty, or anything in particular. This is of course much more notable in the west where the borders between states are roughly straight north-south and east-west affairs. However, I can't help but notice that there are usually notable geographic changes near the borders of even western states. The difference between Oregon and Idaho being a general flattening out and a difference in the color and shape of large rocks.

I hate to say it, but Idaho often passes without leaving much of an impression on me. Of course, most people would not have a hard time believing that, but it is particularly true when you drive through at night, as I did. You notice Boise, because it is larger than any city you've come across in a while, but the state itself is relatively mundane along I-84. There's a freeway change that comes to mind, but most of it is a blur.

This, however, is entirely untrue of the panhandle, which is gorgeous country. High mountains, deep valleys, beautiful lakes. Not only is the scenery much more interesting, but the road is a very complex beast of high passes and tight turns. Some of this is evident in eastern Oregon, but the road through Idaho is quite straight.

I recall I was driving along and talking to Elena on the phone when I crossed the border into Utah, and didn't notice until I was about 12 miles along. So much for differences in geography. In the daytime it is a bit more noticeable. The hills in this part of utah are relatively large, but also quite soft, not the jaggy rocky outcrops which characterise other parts of the state. I-84 takes you along the edge of the Great Salt Lake through the town of Ogden, which is, to my understanding, something like a distant suburb of Salt Lake City. It's a pretty valley, the large hills and short mountains to the east and the lake to the west providing the bulk of the scenery. It is actually a rather well-populated area, and the strip malls and truck stops are in evidence.

There happens to be the ruins of some concrete building along the side of the road out there which has always struck me as a little odd. It is right up against the highway, and covered in graffiti. Not only is this the only graffiti I've really ever seen in Utah, but it is also the only Mormon graffiti I've even seen. Rather than simply spelling out names in cryptic characters or doing more artistic works on the building, it is mostly greeting to elders returning from elsewhere, odd bits of bible quotes, and generally, I feel, misses the subversive point of graffiti altogether.

After Ogden, the road passes through another valley along a small river. There's a power station there, but I've never been able to get a good look at it, as it is pretty well hiding behind a curve from either direction. This road runs quite close to the freight tracks and you can often hear the rumble of the locomotives from inside the car.

This valley widens and narrows several times, revealing green farmlands in the summer, surrounded by increasingly rocky cliffs all around. The highway terminates at I-80, only about 50 miles from the Wyoming border.

Wyoming is an odd beast. It is quite long, and there are significant parts of the state which are flat and wide as far as can be seen. Then you'll come across mountains, cliffs, and jagged rocks revealing a million years of fossil record at an angle that seems impossibly steep. Then, just as suddenly, it all flattens out again, almost leaving you wondering if it was even there.

As you can see, this is from a part of the state which is a little bit less than hugely interesting. I like the clouds, though.

One thing that Wyoming does not have much of its entire length is trees. I recall going from Wyoming to Colorado on the edge of the rockies along a small highway and realizing that the moment I started to see trees along the side of the road was the moment I had entered my home state.

It's actually rather remarkable how few trees there are there. Nebraska actually has Wyoming beat hands down in the tree department, but the rest of the state is decidedly more lackluster.

One of the things this great lack of trees causes is a great abundance of wind. Chicago is the windy city because of its politicians, but Wyoming is quite a bit more literal. Sometimes it feels like the car wants to drive sideways, sometimes it feels like driving through mud, but it really never quite dies down. As a result, I see more windmills there than I've seen anywhere else. Huge windfarms adorn the hills of central Wyoming, stretching off over horizons and really killing any sense of perspective as to how truly large these things are.

For perspective, here's an image of one of these blades on the back of a truck. Pardon the blurriness, but you'll note the length of the blade, extending beyond the frame, versus the length of the truck. I saw several trucks laden with this cargo, heading off to expand one of the farms, I would imagine.

At any rate, I've gone on long enough, and it is well time that I get something to eat. I will continue with the journal of the trip shortly. Until then.