Trip

Traveled to Bullhead City Arizona Saturday Sunday and Monday on the Interstate 15 highway, you can drive from Edmonton Alberta to Las Vegas Nevada on four lane highway. It is a long drive, but the country is beautiful. In Alberta farmers were combining fields of wheat, canola, barley and what have you for grain crops. Then there were fields of the famous Tabor corn their brown silk tassels and green leaves and stalks blowing in the breeze looked like they were dancing a slow waltz.
As we dropped down into Montana it looked like most of the crops were taken off already. There were still corn crops left but I believe it was to be used as feed for corn silage. We seen huge windmills standing majestically on the hills. These giants at two hundred feet high, with their three sixty foot long blades slowly turning, these monsters are producing, the clean electricity. The farther south we went the drier, browner and shorter the vegetation became.
Moving into Idaho, we seen potatoes being harvested, tractors pulling harvesters with tons of potatoes rolling off the tip of the harvester into the trucks. The trucks hauling potatoes to be sorted and stored in low roofed, partly underground dirt covered buildings.
We crossed into Utah then to Salt Lake City. The wind was blowing fifty miles an hour temperature thirty seven Celsius and raining, you could cut the humid air with a knife. That city is busy, four and six lane highways crisscrossing over and under each other, the cement highways were like spaghetti sitting on posts hanging in the air. We drove over mountain passes at six thousand feet, the vegetation would be greener at that altitude but still short. There was more signs of irrigation, with large circles maybe two hundred yards across of absolutely stunning color of green set in a sea of brown sun baked grass and other vegetation. Other farmers pumping water through pipes that are arched between rubber tired drive systems spraying water gracefully on the land in all directions onto freshly seeded, golden stubble.
Then into Nevada where the rocks became reddish brown, the short vegetation forcing is way with crooked short trunks and small green leaves between rocks that look like there should be no reason for anything to be growing there. Also prickly little cactus and plants that resembled short little palm trees looking out of place in the baron landscape. Las Vegas pops up out of nowhere, the land turns from everything struggling to grow, to a bustling city with water, greenery, tall palm trees and traffic going in all directions with tourists and local people going about their day. Down through to a town called Cal Nev Ar where the three states meet approximately there. Into Laughlin and across the Colorado river into Bullhead City. The desert is full of beauty as long as you can look deep into it and appreciate the struggle for life that the plants and animals go through, which for them is just another day of that's the way it is.
Sifu Hayes silentriverkungfu.com Stony Plain Alberta Canada