I have been to Utah several times in the past to visit some of the many national parks in the state. This time I planned to visit the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area park. It is, I believe, the last park I need to visit. Utah is a gorgeous state but it is interesting that all the major park-type parks are in the southern half of the state. Countless vehicles were hauling their boats either to or from Lake Powell.

I have friends that have retired to Utah. I planned to visit both to share a meal while playing "catch up" after several years since last seeing them. Both live on either side -- north and south -- of Salt Lake City. Thus, met one for breakfast and the other for lunch on the same day.

Utah's mountains are mainly just rock faces with a variety of shapes and colors. Some look like photographs I have seen of the planet Jupiter. Some are gnarly roundish rock and sometimes, like for clouds, a person can imagine seeing some familiar form in them (e.g. a face, an animal, etc.).

Utah's highways are sometimes lined with short sunflowers. Sometimes there are long and deep sections of them and other places have just a few of them.

I continue to be stunned at how much of the land in the western states is just basically unuseable desert or scrub or wasteland. I kept seeing highway signs in some parts of the state that the area are "open range" (i.e. cows are not fenced in, thus, may wander onto the highways). But in those areas, I never saw a single cow anywhere on the land, mainly because there is no grass or weeds, just desert bushes and sandy soil.

The west has had a drought for the most part of the past three decades or so. And, in this past decade it has gotten even worse. However, there were some parts of the highways that apparently had just had a flood because dried mud was across large sections of the highway and land and buildings off either side of the highway looked like they got hit hard.

Something very cool I saw just as I was about to reach the entry gate to Glen Canyon -- a small plane (maybe seats eight) landed on a short airstrip. I noticed there was no buildings along the airstrip so I wondered where the people would go. Then, as the plane got to the end of the runway, it made a 90-degree turn east (left) and "drove' into the parking lot where a couple of vehicles were parked. The passengers apparently got plane-to-car service! Wonder if the commercial airlines could start doing that!