June 29 - Salt Lake City, Utah

We were gung ho to walk Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, so we jumped in the truck after breakfast and headed south on I-15. The driving was fast and furious and included some sudden lane changes due to construction that I had to navigate at about 75 mph, so I was very, very glad that I was not towing the trailer. Still, I did not enjoy the driving one whit, but fortunately we arrived at the Shiloh Inn downtown unscathed. I parked at a meter when I found out that the parking meters around the corner from the hotel cost only $1.50 for 2 hours compared to the hotel's parking garage and other public parking lots costing around $5. That limited us to 2 hours, but I thought we would be OK since we usually finish a 10-kilometer walk in that or slightly less time.

The Salt Lake City Volksmarch first did an "S" pattern thru the downtown district of the city, which was a collection of big, rather plain buildings. The next leg passed by Brigham Young's Beehive House were he kept his 11 wives (it's a polygamy thing, we gentiles wouldn't understand!), and proceeded out of the city past the capitol building. The dome of the capitol was black and the central tower surrounded by white plastic, so I inferred that it was undergoing some kind of renovation. Be that as it may, I must say it struck me as pretty ugly altho I tried to take a nice picture of it for the journal.

From the capitol building we walked up City Creek Canyon on one lane of a highway that had been converted to a nice hiker-biker trail. We came to a turning point a mile or two up the canyon, but there we were confused by the directions and took the wrong path back. For those of you doing this walk, the directions say to walk back down on Canyon Road, and that is the completely unmarked wide strip of asphalt that winds back to town thru the middle of the canyon. If you make the mistake of coming back on the nice hiker-biker trail on the other side of the canyon (a continuation of road you walk up the canyon after it takes a U turn), you come back down into the city a couple blocks to the east of the center of the valley. We didn't get lost, but it added enough distance that I started to worry about us running out of time on the parking meter and getting a ticket.

So we walked as quickly as we could back past the huge square that the Mormon church has established around the original Temple. It was kind of like an American version of Vatican City in Italy, but without the Pope. The central headquarters of the church was an absolutely huge skyscraper with maps of the entire world engraved on its base, so the impression I got was that of a very successful multinational business concern with branch offices around the world. Is the Mormon Church listed in Forbes' 500 largest US corporations? There were folks at many of the gates, the men always with the trademark white shirt and tie, but the signs made it quite clear that they would welcome visitors and I was sorry I did not have time to see the temple enclave more thoroughly.

Instead I made a beeline back to the truck and dumped in another 40 cents so that we had enough time to walk the last loop that includes the 2002 Olympic park area, or at least part of it. I was getting pretty footsore by that time and had to stop to bandage my heel as we walked back to the start point to drop off the start card and pay our fee. Except for the one confusing point in the directions, this walk was clearly laid out and was a nice combination of about 50% city walk with the other 50% being the walk up the canyon and back. The part of the walk up the canyon was a long but fairly gentle up grade, so the walk was rated a "2" and probably deserved that rating. The total walk took us two hours and forty minutes, and altho we certainly did go out of our way a bit, I estimated that the original, correct route might be more like an 11 or 12 kilometer walk, so you might want to take that into account if you walk it.

One thing that detracted from the walk was that there were lots of homeless folks along the route and we were directly accosted twice, which I always find unpleasant. Another unusual aspect to the walk was the overpowering presence of the Mormon church in the city. Three of the main streets in downtown Salt Lake City had "Temple" in their name: North Temple, South Temple, and West Temple streets were all around the Temple square. I looked in vain for any street named "Church", "Synagogue", or "Mosque". So it is quite clear that the dominant religion in Utah is Mormonism. Having a dominant religion may, I suspect, affect state politics in much the same fashion that other countries with monolithic religions (e.g. Mexico, Italy, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan...) have political decisions swayed by religion. I was intrigued by the fact that I didn't see any casinos in Utah altho they have spread like a plague of locusts in most of the other states we had driven thru. I saw a billboard for a casino while we were driving in Utah, but the casino was over 400 miles away in the northern part of Nevada!

Another aspect of Utah culture, possibly related to the religion, is that the dominant political party is Republican. We heard on the local NPR station that the state legislature voted to completely fund the Republican primary even though it was a closed primary in which only registered party members could vote. In contrast, the state legislature did not fund the Democratic primary at all, so those funds had to come out of the party coffers. The net effect of this official state sponsorship of the Republican party was, of course, to increase the amount of money that the Republican party could devote to the next election at the expense of money collected from all the taxpayers of the state, Republican or not, which struck me as outrageously unfair. It really seemed to me that Utah might just as well add to their "Welcome to Utah" signs some valuable clarification for visitors such as "Official State Religion: Mormon, Official State Political Party: Republican, Official Gambling Policy: Don't Bet on it!"

After the walk we found a Taco Bell for lunch on our way back to Ogden where we once again tried to see those three museums at the old Union Station that we had missed the previous day. This time we arrived about 1:30 in the afternoon and spent the next 3 hours in the 4 different museums included in a $5 admission. That works out to be only $1.25 per museum, which I think was a good deal! If there is anything that I like better than culture, it is CHEAP culture.

The first museum was just a few rooms full of gems, geodes, crystals, petrified wood, petrified dinosaur bones, and related minerals. If you like this kind of thing at all, I think you would go "Aw gee" for at least at some of these examples. They also sold some of these pieces quite cheaply; I bought a 4 inch square slice of petrified wood for $1.95 that I thought I could work into a stained glass piece some day, and Monika picked up 5 polished pieces of stone for a dollar.

Our next museum was the railroad museum that combined a couple of static exhibits of old rolling stock outside plus a huge HO gauge setup inside. The HO trains were built to be faithful reproductions of the various scenes of railroading in the Golden Age of Steam in general and Utah in particular. Utah is, as they reminded us, the state where the first transcontinental railroad was joined with a golden spike and there was a very detailed account of the construction of that line. Curiously, the original place the golden spike was driven was in the mountains north of the Great Salt Lake, and shortly thereafter the Union Pacific built a bypass to the south that crossed the lake on a trestle. The trestle was later replaced by a filled-in causeway that is still in use today and they had some of the salt encrusted timbers from the old trestle on display in the exhibit. But the high point of the exhibit for us was a very good movie about the last generations of steam locomotives on the Union Pacific line, and that had both good explanations of the different engines plus wonderful clips of the engines working to pull multi-mile-long trains.

The third museum was a large showroom with about 9 really classic antique cars, ranging from the 1905 curved dash Oldsmobile to the 1932 (I think) Packard. All of these automobiles were in running condition and waxed and polished to a fare thee well. I helped push a beautiful old Pierce Arrow back into position, and they let me sit in it while Monika took my picture. Who says you can't have fun while visiting museums?

The fourth museum was a really extensive and well-labeled gun collection that focused on the work of the Browning Company that was headquartered in Ogden. The Browning company was essentially the Browning family for four generations from the time the first Browning joined Brigham Young's trek out to Utah down to the time the company was sold to the Belgian government, according to the docent. The generations of Brownings in between produced such landmark firearms as the Winchester level-action rifles widely used in the west to the rifles used by Theodore Roosevelt to storm San Juan Hill, to the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) used in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. My brother the antique gun collector would, I think, be in hog (or NRA) heaven to be in this museum. Even Monika, who is general less than interested in firearms (after all, she and her family were almost killed in WWII), found the docent's stories quite interesting. We finally staggered out of there shortly before closing and drove back to the campground for our final night in the Great Salt Lake.

After a quick dinner we drove a couple of spur roads to try to spot bison or pronghorns, and we finally did spot a herd of pronghorns in the distance but never any bison. The best way to see the island would be to use a trail bicycle and ride the trails in the back country, but we were just too tired and probably also too inexperienced with our bicycles to do that so we contented ourselves with telephoto shots. To round out the night we took pictures of yet another beautiful sunset over the lake, and then hit the sack early to be rested for the long drive to Boise we planned for the next day.