From Boulder north to Cheyenne and then across Wyoming to Rock Springs is one of those unavoidable tortures that one must endure when traveling in the western United States.

There's lots of time, in between dodging big rigs and trying not to get boxed between the speed freaks and the slow-witted, to reflect on America's vehicular culture. This piece of American mainline, shared by the Union Pacific, crosses the Continental Divide here at one of the roundest, which is not to say lowest, parts of the Rocky Mountains ...but there are no mountains here. Except for rolling hills, occasional escarpments, and lots of sagebrush, there's NOTHING here.

If it wasn't for the inexorable traffic, it isn't ugly country exactly, or even boring. The highway sweeps across this magnificently empty land gracefully. At times you can see the highway 40 miles ahead. Forlorn little towns pop up along the way. Sometimes there are cattle or pronghorn in the distance. There isn't a drop of water for 250 miles.

For example, have you ever noticed the difference between highways and railroads? What can we learn from this? Railroads are built, of course, by the same people who operate the trains, and they've figured out that it's much better to wind around and climb the hill at a steady grade than to swoop directly up hill and down dale. (One of the inescapable truths about both railroads and highways is that any grade is uphill one direction or the other.) Highways are built by a cheapskate government that counts on passing referred costs on to us users: they build the highway as cheap as they can, without an ounce of consideration for the cost to those who travel on it. Mindless ups, cost-cutting downs, no thought for our national efficiency. Interstates in general, and this one in particular, follow the short-sighted path of least resistance, calculated at a time when petroleum was abundant and cheap. Now, under a different energy regime, they're nightmares.

I felt just a little smug to be driving one of the very few vehicles that can recapture a little of the uphill potential energy when going downhill ...but it didn't help us much on this stretch -- more about that below. Most everybody else blows off their hard-won altitude in heat, either braking heat or bearing heat, going downhill and around corners.

Why are there so many long-haul trucks on the road? You cannot convince me they're more efficient in any way than trains. I believe all that truckin' goin' on is inefficiency and laziness in motion. Long-haul trucks are symptomatic of our distribution network's inability to plan. Truckers, you notice right away driving this part of the country, aren't stupid by any means. Imagine, tying up all their manpower and intelligence just to roll a few dozen tons of merchandise all the way across the country! Nevermind the fuelishness.

Our new Prius has been getting a bit better than 50 miles per gallon on the trip so far, with lots of high speed driving, up and over high mountain passes, even running the air conditioning when it's wicked hot outside as it was on the day we traversed southern Wyoming. We were going uphill here, from Cheyenne over the Divide, down into the Divide Basin (a catchment so dry it has neither lake nor drainage), up over the Divide again, and down a little to Rock Springs. But that didn't explain the 43.4 mpg we were getting. We were driving against a thirty mile an hour gale all the way -- and so was everybody else heading west.

Finally, after six hours on the road at an average (legal) speed of over 70 mph, we approached our reward: Rock Springs, Wyoming. No pictures; sorry, but I just couldn't find a thing worth recording. I have vivid memories of Rock Springs from my early trips here with my family. It's too far from anywhere civilized in Colorado to the Tetons for a one-day drive: 550 brutal miles any way you take it. The truckers and most of the other poor sods on this stretch of I-80 aren't making for the Tetons -- thank the Goddess! They're headed from who-knows-where to Salt Lake City and California. But we all take refuge in Rock Springs.

Our motel, the Rock Springs Inn, has a sign over the registration desk, "Welcome Aboard" -- and it feels exactly like that, as if Rock Springs is a lifeboat in an empty ocean of sagebrush and dry arroyos.