June 28 - The Great Salt Lake and Ogden, Utah

Having slept almost around the clock, I was really refreshed and wanted to try to see the recreated trading fort and history museum just down the road. After breakfast we hooked up the trailer and pulled it to the parking lot for the fort. The fort looked really interesting from the outside, and the museum appeared to be both large and modern, which was the good news. Unfortunately, the bad news was that the museum and fort complex didn't open until 10 a.m. and we didn't want to wait an hour and a half, so we reluctantly continued down Interstate 15 to Ogden, Utah. Maybe next time!

After about a half an hour drive south thru the Snake River Basin, we entered the more mountainous area at the southern edge of Idaho. After crossing the Utah state boundary we again descended but this time into the Great Salt Lake basin. We stopped at the Utah welcome center south of the border, and a very accommodating man at the information desk gave us a handful of brochures for attractions in the area. Among those was information on a set of museums at the old Union Station building in Ogden, Utah, plus a "2 for 1" price reduction on the entrance fee, which saved us $5 when we visited it the next day. He also was chatting to another visitor about his favorite campground in the state, which was in a state park right in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. That sounded intriguing to us, so we followed his directions to drove south on I-15 past Ogden and then out into the lake along a very long causeway.

The causeway led us to a campground on Antelope Island where we found a "primitive" campsite. In this case "primitive" means no water, no electricity, no cable TV, no showers and nothing, really, except a very nice paved, pull-thru trailer pad and a spectacular view of the lake and mountains surrounding it. We filled our fresh water tank at the dump station down the road from the visitors center on the island, so we felt we had enough water for a couple of days and that turned out to be the case. Since we had our own bathroom plus shower, refrigerator, stove, sink, and comfy queen-sized bed, I would not really characterize our circumstances as "primitive", but it certainly was cheap at $19 for two nights and unbelievably scenic to boot.

After unhooking and setting up the trailer, we drove the truck back to Ogden for the Volksmarch there. We found the start box at the Ogden Lodge hotel, signed up, and walked a couple of blocks north to join a path that meandered alongside the Ogden River. The path ultimately led us about 3.1 miles eastward toward the mountains. Along the way we watched fishermen at the rapids, kids playing in the stream, and even a couple of people who seemed to be trying to teach their dogs to swim!

The first third of this walk was mostly shaded, the second third was right out in the sun, and the final third was kind of partly shaded. In the middle section we passed a botanical garden with beautiful flowers blooming in the sun right beside the trail. But it also got pretty hot in the sun, so we paused in each of the major underpasses to cool off and drink some of the ice water we had brought with. This turned out to be a "2-bottle" walk, which meant we consumed two 24-ounce water bottles between us, and that is pretty typical for a summer walk on a hot day.

The final part of the path was right beside a "dinosaur park" that featured full-sized replicas of dinosaurs in a large park. We also heard some loud growling sounds as we went by, so I guess that some of these statues are equipped with sound effects! Since Monika was starting to overheat, we didn't take the time to tour the park but that would certainly have been fun, particularly if we had grandchildren along. The turn around point for the walk was a gift emporium and restaurant, which a local person told us had previously been a large swimming pool, dance hall, and bowling alley. The only thing left from that period was a large cigar store Indian out front, but you could see the depression where the swimming pool had been in the middle of the store.

At the upper end of the walk we were right up against the foothills of the mountains to the east of Ogden. I enjoyed the way the slopes were gleaming in the sun and kind of looming over us. The way back seemed, as it usually does, much shorter than the way out, but we kept chugging ice water to keep cool and really enjoyed the walk. Although this walk was an in-and-out that makes you see the same scenery twice, this particular walk was a very pleasant river walk with both the botanical gardens and the dinosaur park as additional points of interest along the way, so we highly recommend it.

After our walk we tried to see the complex of museums in the middle of Ogden at a place called "Union Station". Apparently the old train station has been converted into several different museums with a common entrance fee of $12 for families. Ordinarily I would consider that quite reasonable, but the complex closed at 5 p.m. and we would have only had about 5 minutes to see it all, which was clearly impossible. So on this day I had the rather frustrating experience of being too early for one museum in the morning and too late for another in the evening!

We had to fight our way back to our campsite thru rush hour traffic and road construction, which was an exercise in patient driving. I noticed when the road narrowed from 2 lanes to 1 that the folks here were not as disciplined and polite as the driving I had observed in North Dakota and Montana, but they were also not nearly as rude and undisciplined as drivers in the northern Virginia area. In northern Virginia about 50% of the drivers would try to cut over to the lane that was closing and then cut in again at the front. In North Dakota, almost no one did that. In Ogden about 20% of the drivers were trying the drive around and cut in maneuver, so the driving culture seems somewhere in between the extremes of politeness and rudeness.

Possibly some of the poor driving might have been due to the fact that the driving conditions were quite unusual in that visibility was poor. We had a heavy haze underneath a layer of clouds, and in Virginia that would be caused by just one thing: rain and lots of it. I kept expecting rain but it never materialized. The actual hazy stuff drifting across the road turned out to be blowing dirt from farm fields and construction sites, and, when we were driving on the causeway over to Antelope Island, blowing salt solution or alkali powder of some kind, as far as I could tell. Certainly the next day I had a layer of salt all over the truck and had to really wash the encrustation off the windows in order to see.

Back at camp we still did our nightly computer work after dinner as both computers can work for several hours on battery power, and then we went out to capture a spectacular sunset over the Great Salt Lake. The beach was extremely flat, matched only by the stretches of coral reef beach I saw in the Florida Keys on Wanderung 1. The composition of the beach, however, changed radically as we walked out to the edge of the water to take our sunset pictures. First the beach was a pure white sand, then we walked over a section almost completely of rounded pebbles, some of which were embedded in some kind of matrix to make an aggregate resembling a natural concrete. Next we walked over a layer of encrusted salt that was about two inches thick and could support our weight quite well but was not really very smooth. Finally we reach the edge of the lake, which was surprisingly mushy and muddy in sections. After taking a lot of pictures as the sun went down, Monika downloaded the pictures while I wrote in the journal a bit before turning in for the night.