road trip to Colorado - day 1 - Wyoming

As our birthday present to each other, Mark & I decided to do a 4-day road trip to Boulder, Colorado, to see parts of the country we haven't seen before and to take in a Texas Longhorns (college football) game being held in Boulder. We set out on Friday morning heading north east from Salt Lake City, taking the Interstate highway (I80) across Wyoming to Cheyenne, before turning south to Boulder. Southern Wyoming is very sparsley populated. Close to the Utah border the scenery has some interesting cliffs and rock formations, but as we travelled east across the state I have to say that the countryside is mostly flat, treeless and un-interesting (see pic below).

The only visual relief were the many windmills along the way. (If you look closely you'll see over 20 of them on the ridgeline in the pic above). Wyoming is one of the largest producers of wind energy in the US. Aparently an area of "high wind energy" extends across southern Wyoming from the Utah border on the west to the Nebraska border on the east. "This zone of high wind energy can be attributed to a major gap about 90 miles wide (150km) in the north-south barrier of the Rocky Mountains. Prevailing westerly winds blow with little resistance through this gap across the relatively high plains." We certainly saw many wind farms on the 360 miles (580km) we travelled across Wyoming.