We took a long weekend to drive our nephew over to the Air Force Academy for a leadership camp, maybe the last time we’ll have to drive him anywhere since he has his learner’s permit now.
We split the drive there into two days–SLC to Moab, then Moab to Colorado Springs on I-70–but we went north on the way home and took 40 through Steamboat and Vernal in one long day. Both routes were just gorgeous and I kept thinking, “I bet Wallace Stegner has something to say about this country.”
Boy does he–I looked up the source of this quote from another adventure with Skyler and found an article Stegner wrote in 1981 that’s most of the Sierra Club magazine:
Brought here blindfolded, I would know I was in the desert West by the smell of sage and dust and brittle weeds. Given a glimpse of the ground. I would know from the raw earth and the tufted, clumpy vegetation… that I was west of the 100th meridian. Allowed to see the sky, I might guess from the darkness of its blue and the whiteness of the cumuli that float across it that I was in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico or Arizona. But give me the briefest look at the horizons and I would know I was in Utah, in the high plateaus.
