Las Vegas to Salt Lake City: 491 miles up into Utah

Day two starts where day one ended: at a Rivian charger in Las Vegas. The overnight session at the Adventure Network site had stopped at the 85% limit, which is plenty for around town but short for a desert crossing, so the first move of the morning was back to the pedestal. Raise the limit, restart the charge, and let it climb toward 96% while the sun comes up over the lot. That restart is why the morning reads as two sessions.

Trip A ticked up to 6,796.4, just 9.5 miles over last night’s arrival, all of it the short hop between the charger and the hotel. The truck is still empty, still running the 2 mi/kWh desert number it set yesterday. From here it is north on I-15: across the corner of Arizona, over the Virgin River Gorge, and into Utah, where a 2025 Ducati is waiting.

The Virgin River Gorge is the payoff of the morning, I-15 cut straight through tall limestone walls in the far northwest corner of Arizona, the prettiest twenty miles between Las Vegas and Utah. After that the road climbs, and the efficiency tells the story: the 230.6-mile leg into Beaver, Utah ran 1.87 mi/kWh empty, a notch below the 2.06 to 2.11 the flat desert held, because the gorge and the grade into Beaver lift you from desert floor to 5,856 feet. Trip A read 7,026.9 pulling into the Beaver RAN, where a creamery is built right into the charge plaza, so lunch and the charge happened at the same table. Then back on I-15, still climbing, into the Utah high country. The last charge of the day was the big one: 119.5 kWh in Park City, an hour and a half at 217 kW, the largest single fill of the run so far.

The drop into the Salt Lake Valley closed the day, and the number to remember is 3.38 mi/kWh: 38.3 miles from Park City down to Sandy, the regen from a 2,700-foot descent handing energy back the whole way, the best leg of the trip empty. Trip A finished at 7,277.8, 490.9 miles for the day. That is the whole point of the empty run: four legs of clean baseline efficiency across the desert, the climb, and the descent, no trailer. Tomorrow the Ducati goes on a U-Haul behind the same truck, and we drive the same corridor to find out exactly what the trailer costs.