I-70 Between Denver and Salina

What happened today makes no sense. I've fallen out of the habit of journaling, so perhaps if I write this through in my head, I'll figure it out. If I knew this might go on a website somewhere, I might do it in a more organized way, but since it will go no further than this notebook, it will be a stream of consciousness.

The two-hundred-mile stretch of I-70 between Denver and Salina is among the most stunning sections of major highway in the nation. My bias being from Utah is obvious, and there are far more miles of highway I have not traveled that might prove me wrong, but any opportunity to pass through the mountains, desert, and red rock is one I relish. After thirty years, every stretch of that road is layered with memories of family camping trips, college excursions, "mancation" biking trips, and more recently work trips among the power plants, mines, and oil fields. I've done many sections of the drive by myself, but I've never had the chance to do the entire trip between Denver and Salt Lake solo.

Five days ago, I drove to Denver via I-80 through Wyoming. It's an easy drive and mostly highway save the corner that cuts down to Colorado, but barren for most of the way. It's possible the last portion is scenic, but I did it in the dark and missed it. That's a long-winded way of saying I saved the I-70 route for the return trip where I could do the best portions in daylight.

The entire drive should take almost exactly eight hours, so planning for food and bathroom stops, I figured on nine or nine and a half hours. Driving as much as I do for work, you develop a good sense for how long a trip will take. What I don't understand about this drive is how a nine hour drive can actually take eleven hours while feeling like only five.

The first thing I did after arriving home was turn off {{tracking app}} and check the timestamps to see why the drive took so long. I was sitting on my driveway, wanting to go inside after being away for six days, but knowing I wouldn't be able to focus on anything until I reconciled the drive. I was confused for a few moments, looking at the entries to see how long my stops were, but nothing matched. Then I remembered it was tracking my drive time between stops, not the stops themselves.

Everything seemed to add up after that until I realized the last entry was between my gas stop in Rifle and the Subway dinner in Grand Junction. I sat for a few moments in utter confusion until I remembered the "needs review" section that flags any routes the app thinks are suspicious or might be personal. I expected to see the route there, which I did, but instead of the one route reflecting the drive, there were two. Rifle to Helper, and Helper to my house. I didn't stop in Helper.

Had this GPS glitch not occurred, what I saw in Helper would be dismissed as a figment of my overzealous imagination. This made it truly strange, and is the reason behind this entry. Helper, Utah is a small mining town that sits, depending on your direction of travel, at the start or end of the Spanish Fork Canyon stretch of Highway 6. Running across a narrow gap separating the canyon from the town is a long and tall fin of rock that looks like a castle wall, thus the name Castle Gate. Being the castle nerd that I am, driving past that cliff always makes me smile imagining a contingent of archers raining down arrows from above.

As Highway 6 goes through Helper, you pass a giant Maverik gas station on the left just before the road goes up a little bit and through Castle Gate. The entire drive had been as ideal as it could be for the depths of winter. The abnormally dry season left roads bone dry, the sun shining the entire day. As I drove up that hill towards Castle Gate, I entered what I thought was a bank of fog. It swirled along the ground and rushed away as I passed through. I then passed a long line of rail cars fully laden with coal, then spotted the carbon power plant off to the side, with its dual smoke stacks just visible through the haze. I could just see plumes of steam rising into the air. This wasn't fog, it was from the plant. My next thought was that I hadn't seen any orders from this location for a while, and needed to follow up with {{salesrep}} to see what the story there was. Then the air cleared and I was on my way up the canyon.

That moment is very vivid in my mind. The sun was setting, and that low-angle golden hour light highlighted the ragged cliffs and pine trees clinging to the sides, the meadows with dry winter grass waving in a light breeze. That moment of beauty was one of many from the drive, and the reason for selecting this route for my return. But sitting in my driveway looking at those two GPS entries needing review, I remembered that the Carbon Power Plant in Helper was torn down in 2015. {{salr}} was in a fit because that closure killed a quarter million dollar mercury analyzer opportunity that might have saved it.

Once I approved the entries, the timestamps all lined up, and the drive did take that long. If I have time and think of it, I'll plot the stops on Google Maps to see what it says.

11:23 PM

It's now two hours later, everyone is in bed, and I have the route up on my screen. According to Google, including the exact GPS coordinates for every stop, my route should have been 492.6 miles and taken seven hours and 56 minutes. My stops were a little over an hour, so call it nine hours from the hotel. According to the logs, I actually drove 501.3 miles and it took just under ten hours.

Time has a way of compressing the older you get, so I'm sure my stops were really just longer than I'm thinking. It's not unheard of to lose signal in that canyon, and I know most of that highway after Castle Gate has no cell reception, so a GPS anomaly is also not out of the question given how questionable data is these days. Maybe I just drove slower up the canyon, which is why that leg took thirty minutes longer than it should. It's also not out of the question that I'm just remembering some other trip. Human memory is a funny thing, and we have a tendency to remember what we want and make slight tweaks to what we find uncomfortable. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's all strange enough to be worth making this record. I'm probably more confused after writing this than I was before.