Nothing Mundane

September 3, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 46.1: Salt Lake City

In mid-may we traveled southeast from Twin Falls, headed for Salt Lake City. It was a long day’s drive, but for once, we didn’t mind the distance. We were finally in Utah! The Promised Land of our road trip, mountainous Utah is home to five national parks, numerous state parks and national monuments, and – indisputably, in our opinion – the most beautiful scenery in the continental United States.

We spent a month in Utah, beginning in mid-May, and we took a lot of photos – a whopping 8,633, to be exact.* It’s a mind-blowing place, and we are pretty excited to finally get to share it with all of you. In fact, 11 of our next 13 blog posts are about national parks – so stay tuned.

* Heather deals with all the photos for our blogs (Jake does the writing), so… sorry, dear.

Mountain Temples

The drive to Salt Lake City is absolutely stunning, in every direction. The city sits on a broad plain, but it’s surrounded by mountains, especially to the east. Of course, being Utah rookies, that’s exactly where we had made reservations to stay. We didn’t realize it when we booked our site, but our campground – located in nearby Park City – was at more than 6,100 feet! Salt Lake City is only at about 4,000 feet, and there was a LOT of vertical climbing to get up to our spot. Luckily, our RV made it just fine, and we got to enjoy staying in a beautiful Utah state park, one of the nicest we had seen since Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico.

We took a day trip down from the mountains to visit Salt Lake City, the last large city we would see for two months, and we actually came away pretty impressed. The city itself is clean and pretty, with lots of trees for shade and intentionally wide streets. There were a lot of people on bicycles – always a good sign – and even some hipster types, with piercings and tattoos and beards. That was a little surprising to us, because Salt Lake City is the center of the Mormon world, and they are a particularly clean-cut group. If you didn’t know, Utah is something like 98% Mormon – primarily because nobody else wanted to live in what used to be an unforgiving desert.

As the headquarters of Mormondom, there is a lot of work and money put into the city. It’s particularly concentrated in and around the Mormon Temple, a beautiful series of structures with exquisite landscaping. Some areas were off-limits to us heathens, but frankly, the outside was pretty enough to satisfy. And we weren’t the only ones who liked it – we counted at least six wedding photo shoots in the half-hour we were there.

We had planned to tour inside the Tabernacle, a round dome with perfect acoustics. Jake visited as a child, and vividly remembers sitting in the back seats and hearing a pin drop on the altar. However, we got a little scared off, and never went in. See, every tour comes with a recruitment pitch, and, well… Heather isn’t great at saying “no.”

We’re happy with our current religious status (and we like alcohol and caffeine), so we skipped out on the tour. With some time to kill, we instead headed out to the beach. The Great Salt Lake isn’t the ocean, but it’s as close as you’re likely to find in the interior of the country – big, blue, and briny.

There wasn’t a lot to do there, though, so we headed back into the mountains. We spent a few hours touring Park City, a classic ski town. This is where the 2002 Olympics were held, and while the Olympic Village is now just big box stores and coffee shops, many of the athletic facilities still exist. Unfortunately, the Olympic Park was still closed for the season – we were there one day early! – so we didn’t get to try out any of the attractions, like the zip line that runs down along the ski jump ramps (!!). D’oh!

Stymied, we drove over to the older part of Park City. It was actually quite cool – or, in what we can only assume is the local parlance, “chill, brah.” There were lots of charming little shops, and the whole area reminded us of a Swiss ski town named Zermatt we visited a few years ago. There weren’t a lot of people around yet, but we found something better than people: a brewery serving real beer!

If you’ve never been to Utah, you might not realize how exciting this is – even in bars, beer sold in Utah is typically 4.2% alcohol (or lower) by law. Drinking a glass of the good (read: strong) stuff while relaxing on a mountain patio was a rather nice way to finish the afternoon.

As a bonus, as we walked back to our car, we found some street art, courtesy of the one and only Banksy! We were amused (but unsurprised) to find it protected by glass and a metal frame.

Planet Utah

That was pretty much it for our first visit, but our tour of Utah was a big loop, and we returned through Salt Lake City a month later. We had originally planned to go back to the Olympic Park, but the vagaries of RV campsite reservations left us north of SLC, in Ogden. We took advantage of our new location to visit Antelope Island State Park, a large island in the Great Salt Lake connected by a causeway.

The island was beautiful. It’s surprisingly mountainous, and many locations offered striking views of the water and Salt Lake City. We intended to hike up to the peak at the center, but… it was hot. Really, really hot.

So, we cut our hike short to go wildlife watching. A herd of bison roams free on the island, and they are fun to photograph.

While we were watching and taking photos with our zoom lens, we got to see a real Planet Earth moment. A coyote came out of the brush and approached one of the young bison, obviously hoping for a snack. However, a full-grown bison noticed and charged full-steam at the coyote, which wisely retreated back into the brush. You can see this below – the coyote is the blotchy grey spot in the lower left.

The coyote wasn’t going home empty-mouthed, though, and it trotted over to a different part of the herd, prowling around while two bison eyed it. It was hard to see what happened next, but the coyote must have found a bird’s nest in the tall grass, because suddenly some birds started swooping at the coyote aggressively! Unfortunately for the birds, the coyote didn’t seem too bothered, and we’re guessing it ended up with some eggs or chicks for dinner.

Good for the bison, good for the coyote, bad for the birds. Nature can be rough.

Roadtrip Time Travel

Roadtrip Status

Still alive? Check.

Where are you now? Pittsburgh, PA, seeing some friends and family and living in denial about the end of our road trip.

Next location? TBD as always. Upstate NY, maybe?

Follow Us On Social Media

Latest Posts

Week 56: Colorado (before we moved there)

Week 54: Glacier National Park: Part 1

(all roadtrip posts)

August 27, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 46: The Reverse Oregon Trail to the Moon

We first arrived at the Pacific Ocean in late January, and it was a constant companion for months. But in early May, we finally hit our northward limit near Seattle, and it was time to hitch up our wagons, turn the corner, and bid a sad adieu to the West Coast.

We drove southeast across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho for two long but beautiful days, and it was fascinating to watch the terrain change before our eyes. As we crossed the spine of the Cascade mountains, the pristine evergreen forests suddenly disappeared, turning into scrubland that reminded us of West Texas.

As it turns out, while western Washington is the wettest place in the country, the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon are high deserts. Fresh off of redwoods and rainforests, it was a sudden transition, but a welcome one – because the desert is freaking awesome.

Grueling Pace

We covered a lot of ground in two days. Our first night was spent at a Wal-Mart near La Grande, Oregon, an area which seemed pretty empty even to us. The Wal-Mart parking lot was quite popular, though, especially among travelers – so much so that there was actually a placard where we parked our RV suggesting things to do in the area.

The next morning, we stopped at the excellent National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City, which was filled with cool displays about life on the actual Oregon Trail. Sadly, there were no monocolor terminals available to play the original game (which we have a “slight” affinity for), but it was fascinating nonetheless.

Here’s a fun fact we’re pretty sure we saw here: people constantly tried to bring their 1,000+ lb cast iron stoves in their wagons with them, only to have to abandon them along the trail because of the weight. A local entrepreneur realized this and began collecting the stoves from the trail, then bringing them back and selling them to new trailgoers, thereby creating his own, stove-based internal economy. Smart!

After checking out the museum and learning some interesting tidbits, we went outside and took a short hike through the blazing desert sun – still weird to think about in Oregon – for some pretty scenery…

… and a view of the actual wagon ruts from the actual Oregon Trail!

Wait, the actual Oregon Trail? From the 1850s?

Well, that’s what they claimed, but upon reading the fine print, we discovered they were “reproductions” of where the wagons would have rolled. Eh, close enough.

Fording the Snake River

After the Interpretive Center, we headed along essentially the reverse path of the old Oregon Trail. Southern Idaho is basically one big mountain range with a giant valley cutting a pass through it – you can see it with Google Earth – and there’s really only one sane way to go across it. We used the same way the settlers did, just slightly more easily.

We stopped for a few days in Twin Falls, Idaho, in the center of the valley. We aren’t sure what we expected from Idaho, but it was surprisingly prosperous and normal. We stocked up on supplies (but no cast-iron stoves), ate at a restaurant called Jakers (!!), and found out that there actually are two waterfalls in Twin Falls.

Oh, and the falls are spectacular.

Shoshone Falls claims to be the “Niagara of the West,” which is pretty questionable considering there were like 20 people there (and no casinos). That said, it roars with some serious force. The Snake River Canyon that it sits in is no slouch, either – a full mile wide, Evel Knievel once tried to jump the gorge on his “specially engineered rocket motorcycle,” but he failed when his parachute opened immediately on takeoff. (A bummer to be sure, but it definitely could have been worse.)

The whole gorge area was extraordinarily beautiful, including the other waterfall and the Perrine Bridge crossing the chasm. We really knew nothing about Twin Falls and didn’t expect to wander into something like this, but that’s basically why the West is awesome.

Crater Faces

The one thing we did expect to do in Twin Falls was visit Craters of the Moon National Monument, and it didn’t disappoint. The “craters” are just remnants from an ancient lava flow, but they look otherworldly, especially in a setting like Idaho instead of Hawaii.

The lava field shown above is the North Crater Flow, and it’s only about 2,000 years old – a baby, really. The oldest lava fields in the park are around 15,000 years old, and although they are currently “dormant,” they are expected to erupt in less than a thousand years. We thought about waiting around a couple hundred years to watch, but alas, our roadtrip schedule was unforgiving.

While the lava fields were pretty neat, our favorite feature of the park was the cinder cone. Inferno Cone is essentially a 160 ft tall sand dune made out of volcanic ash.

The only downside, and it was a big one, was the ungodly strength of the wind that day. It was constant and oppressive. Climbing up the Inferno Cone required pulling our hoods down and walking nearly parallel to the ground. And since the ground was literally ash, we were under constant assault from airborne particles seeking to make their way into our eyes, ears, noses, and especially mouths.

Got some cool pictures, though.

After recovering from the volcanic ash pelting, we moved on to check out the Spatter Cones, the “Old Faithful” of Craters of the Moon. It’s pretty obvious why: Old Faithful spews out hot water every 35-120 minutes, while the Spatter Cones spew out hot lava every… well, 500-3,000 years.

OK, maybe the comparison is a bit overblown. Still, the Spatter Cones were pretty neat, and frankly, this is one eruption we’re thankful not to have seen in person.

The final feature at Craters of the Moon were lava tube caves. We really wanted to explore them, but it required a little hike to get to the caves, and we had hit our limit of bone chilling wind and volcanic cinders raining down on us. The lava tube caves will have to wait for our next cross-country RV road trip.

On our way out we snapped a few more pictures. Even the side of the road was cool.

Chekhov’s Interpretive Center

Whew! This was a long blog post. [Ed. note: Heather really loved Craters of the Moon and made that section approximately 800 times longer.] But hold on for one more second, because we’re about to tie this entire thing together with a bow.

Remember how we started this post with the Oregon Trail? Well, just outside of Craters of the Moon is a rather pretty area known as Goodale’s Cutoff.

Pioneers on the Oregon Trail used Goodale’s Cutoff, an alternate route along the trail, to skirt the lava flows and avoid potential Shoshone Indian attacks along the Snake River. The Cutoff paralleled the Oregon Trail for some distance, before rejoining it in… Baker City, home of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center!

And so, just like the moon’s orbit, we have come full circle.