Fifth Day: to Ivins, UT

Wednesday July 11, 2007, 11 pm:

Knowing that we had a long day of driving ahead of us, and having had a good night’s sleep the night before, we were up and at ‘em on Wed. morning. Jason walked Skadi and Ares with Becca while I packed things up. We were on the road from Becca’s by 7:50 a.m., which may prove to be the early point of the trip.

Once we got going on I-70 west of Denver we got into the Rockies for real. No more straight, flat driving. We were able to keep moving, but we went up and down some serious grades, and curved around some serious peaks. It was pretty fun to see and a little hairy to drive in a couple of spots. At one point we came over a hill and all of a sudden we came upon a town nestled (as all such towns must be described) in the mountains at the foot of a peak sitting on a mountain lake. I believe the town was Frisco. We pulled off for some pictures and cardio. At something over 9,000 feet, it was one of the highest points we’d experienced so far, and about the highest altitude I’ve ever been at. Jason convinced me to check out the effect of the altitude, so I took off for a jog about 100 yards down the parking area, looped around and came running back. The whole way running I felt pretty good; the breathing was working fine. When I pulled up to a stop, I was wheezing like nothing else. I thought I had just run clear from Denver. Jason, bastion of fitness and cardio that he is, pointed and laughed.

The driving through the Rockies was gorgeous. We passed several ski resorts that were exhibiting their summer coloring—that is had big green slopes down their sides. We passed Copper Mountain, Vail, and Eagle among other communities.

After a while you get somewhat accustomed to the American Alps appearance of the ski resort communities in the Rockies, but pretty soon after I got to that point we were driving uphill and we saw a sign ahead welcoming us to Utah. That was kind of a good feeling, like we were making progress. Then we crested the hill, came out of the mountains and saw an amazing, expansive view of the huge valley that we had just entered. You go from green mountains to desert with distant, desolate mountains and rocks in all directions. Some of the views are great, especially in the area of Arches Nat’l Park, which we drove near on I-70. We stopped at several scenic overlooks and got pictures. Many of them looked kind of like the Grand Canyon, or so I imagine. It took longer than planned to get through Utah, but we didn’t have a particular time to get to St. George, UT, where we were staying with John and Kristen Hunt.

You may have heard that there have been quite a number of fires burning out west this summer. We had heard a couple of days before driving in Utah that part of our path through the state had been recently blocked by one of the fires. In fact, Utah was currently experiencing the single largest fire in state history. The first evidence of fires we saw was along the side of I-70 in Utah. We drove up multiple cars worth of firefighting officials finishing putting out a fire that stretched for several hundred yards down the road. I speculated that it was from a cigarette butt or something. We could see multiple locations where the ground was still smoking and they were still using the hose on a section, though we didn’t see any flames.

We worked our way across Utah to I-15 in the middle of the state. Soon after getting on I-15 we saw where some of the wildfires had burned entire hillsides of foliage. There was a spot where the fire had jumped over I-15. We had heard that I-15 was closed in this area a couple of days prior, but fortunately it was open by that point. Along the way, we saw several other burnt areas and smoke coming out of the mountains to the west of I-15. We even saw a helicopter with the bucket underneath drop its contents onto the mountain below. I couldn’t see any flames there either, but it was a dramatic sight.

We finally arrived at John and Kristen Hunt’s house in Ivins, Utah, which is a small community a little outside of St. George, Utah. The drive was about 12.5 hours, which is the longest so far, but it wasn’t too bad a drive, with a lot of great sights to see along the way.

All for now, good night…