A Day in Utah

Departed Evanston, Wyoming, this morning, and was in Utah 5 minutes later.

At a rest area, I got some information about Salt Lake City and took this photo.





Temple Square, Salt Lake City photos...

Brigham Young, who led the Mormons
to Utah, welcomes visitors to the square

This is the Salt Lake Temple of the
Latter Day Saints Church.  It's sacred,
and is NOT open to the public

This is the Tabernacle, right behind the
Temple.  It's the home of the famous
Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Left Temple Square and went one block
east.  At the end of State Street is the
Utah State Capitol building 

Snapped this photo on the way out of Salt Lake City when I stopped for gas.  These are the mountains just southeast of town on which Olympic winter events were contested.




The Great Salt Lake is an amazing physical feature, but it is pretty unpleasant.  The smell is not so great, and there are dead bird carcasses in the sand/salt.  I guess they fly in, look around for food and water, and die.  I saw the Lake near the Saltair Resort.  This venue is a place where concerts are held, but the two pavilions which preceded it on the same spot were serious vacation spots.  They were once called the "Coney Island of the West."  Across the interstate highway is the Kennecott copper smelting operation, a reminder that mining is still big business around here.  As I drove west across the salt desert, I saw a big salt extraction plant near the Lake belonging to Morton.

Footprints in the salty sands.  If it's dry,
it's crusty.  If it's damp, it's gooey

As I crossed the 40-mile salt desert, I couldn't help but be reminded of the settlers who tried to cut time off their trip to Oregon or California by crossing this mess.  I'm amazed that any of the pioneers' covered wagons actually made it across the crusty, sticky, gooey muck.  The Bonneville Salt Flats are near the western end of the salt desert.  This is an area of the harder, firmer salt where land speed records have been regularly set.  It is also the whitest part of the salt desert.  Scientists say that the Great Salt Lake of today was once a much larger inland sea called Lake Bonneville.  This is supposed to be all that remains of the western part of that sea.

Wendover, at the Utah/Nevada border, has a line across the main street to show you where the state line is (the Nevada part is called "West Wendover").  Nevada allows gambling, and there are casinos here that remind one of Reno or Las Vegas.  Wendover Will, the big metal cowboy sculpture, guards the western entrance into Wendover.

Crossing Wyoming

Here are some of the photos from the drive across Wyoming.  There are no words to describe the sights!

This is sagebrush.  It's about the only kind of plant that can survive in the dry, windy Great Divide Basin.  That's between the eastern and western mountains of Wyoming which form the Continental Divide.  Once you cross this desert, all the rivers flow west.

The Sinclair Oil Refinery took up almost the whole town of Sinclair.

Fort Bridger Historic Site on the west side of the state is the place where frontiersman Jim Bridger established a trading post when he saw that the trapping/trading life was soon going to be replaced by the settlers moving west.  The US government eventually built a fort there.  Outside the gate, a set of old Lincoln Highway tourist lodgings, the Black and Orange Cabins, have been restored.

Cheyenne and Laramie

Yesterday, I saw two southeastern Wyoming cities.

Cheyenne is barely in Wyoming, but it's still the capital.  It's a very "Western" town, and they've done a lot in the downtown area to tell the history.  Still, a lot of the old buildings aren't there anymore, so you have to look at pictures and do a lot of imagining.  They DO have a great old Union Pacific railroad depot, which serves as their visitor center; and they have these cool boots that have been painted up with different themes and placed all over town.  In a park, I saw the biggest locomotive ever made, the "Big Boy 4004," which was especially made for the Rocky Mountain trip from Cheyenne to Ogden, Utah, and back.

Between Cheyenne and Laramie, the Rockies rose to 8,640 feet.  Just before Sherman's Summit, there was a stop in the median where the "Tree in the Rock" is located.  When the Transcontinental Railroad came through the pass, the men working on the track found this pine growing up out of a rock, and they curved the track slightly to miss it.  Some trains would stop to give the tree a drink of water, and travelers along the Lincoln Highway used it as a landmark, sometimes camping there.



The highest point on the Lincoln Highway was at the Summit.  Today, the Exit 323 Rest Area is there.  It has two monuments--a HUGE bust of Abraham Lincoln which overlooks the highway and a monument to the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association, Henry Joy.  Joy was the president of Packard Motors, and he loved to get out on the road.  This monument was first placed at his favorite camping spot on the LH in the nearby mountains, where he said he wanted to be buried.  He wasn't buried beneath it, and the monument has been moved so that more people can see it and to protect it from vandals.

In Laramie, the views of the Rockies (this range is known locally as the "Snowies") are tremendous from almost anywhere in town.  This is the home of the University of Wyoming, and I visited their art museum, which had a lot of Western-themed works and a gallery of astro-photography (pictures of space from telescopes).  I snapped a picture of their football field, which was built in honor of World War II veterans and is called War Memorial Stadium.  I was wearing my UW shirt, so I fit right in.  Go Cowboys!!