As we walked, Eberhart recounted his travels thus far. He had begun 46 days earlier at the southern terminus of the Continental Divide trail. From there, he headed east, through the blackened badlands of New Mexico, through the gateway city of El Paso, and on to an endless spread of dry dun plains. The traffic consisted almost entirely of semi-trailer trucks surging past every 10 seconds at speeds of a 100 miles per hour (sic). He had learned to take shallow breaths through his nose, so as to not inhale their fumes. The sound was meteoric.
Where exactly is this highway where trucks do 100 MPH on a regular basis? Most of them are governed to 65+epsilon MPH at double precision, as anyone who's had to wait for them to pass each other can attest.
Even on the 85 MPH-posted roads in Texas, a large truck doing 100 MPH is going to attract both the attention and the interest of the state police.