Roadtrip to no where

I have officially decided that Utah is one of my new favorite places. On the trip south I spent a lot of time on less traveled highways and random roads. The high country of southern utah is just amazing and I have to go back to explore it. All the diversity in that state and some of Arizona made the drive on Friday far more pleasureable than most endurance drives I have been on.
Along the way I noticed a funny little phemomenon. So you have seen the movie Super Troopers right? Ok, in the beginning one guy has a dummy in his squad car parked o the highway shoulder. Well, several towns in UT actually employ this tactic. Is that a little weird? Once I saw it was a dummy, I had to turn around and get a picture. Then I saw 3 more in the subsequent small towns along the highway.
Oh yea, and another weird thing about UT is that it seems that the cool thing to do is put the first letter of your town (or any random letter) in 100 ft tall white lettering on a hillside nearby. I tried to spot the whole alphabet, but only saw about half the letters.

The weather out in UT was classic desert thunderstorms while I was there and it gave me quite a show at every viewpoint. The pic left is of a massive rain, wind and cloud front swallowing a 1500 ft tall cliff band.

I managed to make it out to Hueco Tanks, TX today for a few hours of bouldering at the agreed upon "best" bouldering area in the world. The features are similar to Smith actually, but the rock

quality is much more uniform and solid. I didnt have much time to take pics but I snagged on e on this V3 that I worked for a while. I got it after a while, but I missed the pad from a ways up on one fall and sketched myself a bit. When bouldering, spotters are good to have around. I found some eventually who were local and hung out with them for a bit on a fun cave problem.