Day 16: Travel day
Welcome
Yesterday we drove from Salt Lake City to North Platte.
Our day started with a quick visit to the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet where I enjoyed a bowl of oatmeal with dried fruit, roasted nuts, and yoghurt.
It was my turn behind the wheel and I took my time with the seven-point driver’s seat adjustment system, making sure I was comfortable and secure before we eased out of the hotel carpark.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway carried us out of Salt Lake City, this designation being given to the significant portion of the i80 that connects San Francisco, CA, to Cheyenne, WY. We climbed through the Wasatch Mountains and descended into Wyoming, entering the Green River Basin with its many striking rocky outcrops and hogbacks.
Passing through Echo Canyon on the eastern side of the Wasatch mountain range.
📷 Tristan Deck
Approaching the twenty-nine 2.1MW Suzlon S88 Turbines of Mountain Wind 1, Fort Bridger, Wyoming.
📷 Tristan Deck
📷 Tristan Deck
The sagebrush steppe of the Green River Basin.
📷 Tristan Deck
We passed through Rock Springs and were soon in the Great Divide Basin where we crossed the Continental Divide, the hydrological partition that separates waters that drain into the pacific from those draining into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
Sedimentary rock formations outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming.
📷 Tristan Deck
📷 Tristan Deck
In the south-eastern tip of Wyoming is the city of Cheyenne and it is there that the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway pivots south and becomes the i25 heading to Denver. We had different ideas however and we stayed on i80 which luckily became the Lincoln Memorial Highway and continued eastbound.
The Sinclair Refinery in Sinclair, Wyoming. One of Sinclair’s two refineries, it processes 85,000 barrels per day into propane, gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and asphalt.
📷 Tristan Deck
As we headed towards Nebraska we entered the High Plains, the semi-arid western region of the Great Plains that stretches from Montana all the way to northwest Texas. Farmland began to emerge as we continued east and drew closer to the Platte River, one of the major irrigation sources for this region of western Nebraska which is classified as ‘hot-summer humid continental’ – barely avoiding the ‘semi-arid’ classification.
The flat grassland of the high plains of southwest Nebraska.
At 8.20pm we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express in the town of North Platte after a 1060 kilometre drive. The bright green logo with its playfully scribed ‘H’ was a sight for sore eyes and we gratefully stretched our legs in the carpark. We took the time to clean up and do laundry and then reembarked for a drive across to the other side of the highway where we found a pleasant experience waiting for us at Penny’s Diner, a 24 hour restaurant rated 4.4 stars from 1,608 reviews.
The green and purple livery of this fine establishment feels like a home away from home.