Salt Lake City

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When we got to Warner Truck Center in Salt Lake City, we tried to figure out where we could and should park for the night. The service place is actually a 24/7 operation, but they were closed because of Memorial Day. I suppose everybody deserves a day off every now and then. We found a place to unhitch the car and leave the rig while I drive the premises trying to find a place to settle down for the night. This is a huge place with probably over a hundred new Freightliner Trucks for sale. I couldn't find a better spot so I came back and positioned the rig so we could put out the one bedroom slide. Our spot was far enough off the Main Street to avoid traffic noise but several semis were parked on the same side road and had their refrigeration units running all night. Even after putting in earplugs, it was not a very restful night.

The next morning I went in with my 5 year maintenance list and talked with the service guy. He figured they could have things done by mid-afternoon. It didn't make sense to just sit around there all day so we hopped in the jeep and went exploring. We decided to head southwest of town and try to get three more geotour caches in for another Utah county. So far we have completed 6 counties but need to do 10 of the 29 in order to qualify for their geocoin prize. We have a full week in SLC and the counties around here are not too big so there is a chance we can get it completed. If not, it's unclear how long before we would be back in Utah so it seemed like it was now or never.

We have been finding that many of these Utah Geotour caches are in interesting locations and the 3 we did in Tooele county did not disappoint. Our first stop was at the Benson Gristmill in Stansbury Utah. This is one of those pioneer village type places that looked really interesting but unfortunately we were here too early so the gates were closed. The cache was outside the fence so we were able to make the find. Our next stop was in Grantsville - the Donner-Reed Museum. Apparently this area was where the ill fated Donner party started having serious trouble crossing the Salt Lake area. Many of the parties artifacts were collected and are now on display in the museum. But alas, we were too early to do anything other than find the geocache and move on.

Looking Over Fence at Benson Gristmill

Our next stop proved to be our most memorable. The small town of Ophir. And when I say small, I'm not exaggerating. The population was 23 in 2000. It was a mining town back in the day. It is up a canyon road into the higher elevation of some mountain. As we turned off the main road, we crossed the standard cattle grate. Much of the area in Utah is open range for cattle so we have become accustomed to these things. The livestock warning sign was also pretty typical of the areas we have been traveling of late.

It is only about 3 miles or so to town where the cache is hidden, but it took us at least 20 minutes to go that distance. At first, we came upon a handful of cows on the road. Not a big deal, they were off to the side and other than passing them slowly as to not spook them, it was uneventful. But at each turn we came across more and more of them. Some were heading uphill as we were, while others were coming back down. None of them respected the lane markers! When they were three or four abreast, it was quite challenging to navigate around them.

Nicely on the Shoulder of Road

Unsure of Us

MOOOve Over!

Some of the larger ones had horns. Not quite big as long horn cattle but dangerous looking nonetheless. One of these was heading down the hill, in its proper lane I might add, but as I slowly approached, it veered across the centerline forcing me to use what little shoulder there was before it dropped off to the gully beside the road. Most of the cattle were predictable with the exception of the young ones. Once they saw us coming, they would start to trot along and swerve this way and that reminding me of toddlers at a grocery store.

Within a few hundred feet of the cache, there was a traffic jam. The only thing that eventually clear it up was the cowboy on horseback keeping them moving up the street through town. It was unclear whether this is a daily routine or if it was a semiannual event to move the herd from a low pasture to a high pasture. The town itself was quite cute. Lots of old restored buildings with remnants of its mining history. We were not able to stay long since we had lost cell coverage and we needed to be able to take a call if there was some issue with our rig. Under better circumstances, I think we could have spent an hour exploring what was here.

In the Town of Ophir

We had missed a call from the service department so we headed back to finalize what we wanted to have done, headed for a late lunch and by mid-afternoon we had our rig back as promised. Good for another year of travels. We had booked a spot in the KOA in town. At 9 miles, it was by far our shortest travel day! Obviously we didn't bother to hook the car up and we just headed over separately. The site we were in was pretty nice but a little tight with our neighbors. Their picnic table was right next to one of our windows and one of them liked to smoke while sitting there. One surprising thing was how fast the wi-fi was. About 60 Mbps down and 45 Mbps up. That is unprecedented in any campground we have stayed at and rivals some of the faster public libraries we have  visited.

Our campground is only a couple miles from Temple Square. The beautiful 35 acre home of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. According to the online schedule, there was supposed to be a rehearsal of the Bells on Temple Square one day and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the next. Chris wanted to see either of them so we picked the handbells. We arrived early enough to explore the place. We stop at one of two visitor centers on the property. Two young ladies greeted us and I could tell they really wanted to talk religion with us but we managed to keep the discussion to which areas are open to viewing.

Monument on the Temple Square Grounds

Vulcan Mind Meld?

There are lots of people there. Probably 1/3 of them are nicely dressed and are there to give tours or explain their beliefs. The Salt Lake Temple itself is not open to tours but is an impressive building based on its outside appearance.

Beautiful Salt Lake Temple

Pond on Backside of Temple

The Salt Lake Tabernacle is a dome like building with a surprisingly plain interior. To us it looked like a fairly modern building but was actually built in the 1860's! The impressive feature of the building is the organ and apparently the acoustics. This was where the handbell rehearsal was to take place. We arrived early and were greeted by the orchestra practicing. We ended up watching them for half an hour before realizing the handbells weren't going to show up. Oh well, these things happen.

Orchestra Practices at Tabernacle

Impressive Pipe Organ

Another thing that is apparently a huge deal here is the Family History Library. They house the largest genealogical collection in the world. We had been told by a friend in the Newmar club, that if she were in Salt Lake City, she would spends days going thru their collection to work on her family tree. In the past few years, I have dabbled a bit in my family history. Basically building on the work from one of my sisters. Maybe I will need to dedicate some time on a future trip to work on it some more.

Nice Landscaping in Temple Square

Flowers in Bloom

Our next destination took us a bit north of town to the adjacent Davis county and to visit Antelope Island State Park. There is a long causeway connecting the island situated in the Great Salt Lake. Our Utah park pass got us in but there was a $2 fee to drive across the causeway. There are lots of geocaches while heading out to the island but no real parking spots and when we did stop at one viewing area, the bugs were so extreme that signing the log for one cache was adequate.

On the island, we headed south the Fielding Garrett Ranch. On our way, there were 5 bison in the field not too far from the road. These things are huge and when they rolled around on the ground, a huge dust cloud was created. The ranch was interesting in that much of the equipment and many of the buildings were still present. Better yet, there were lots of informational signs describing how some of the equipment was used. There were also a number of horses in the one paddock. Apparently they are used for some of the horseback tours you can take. We really didn't have time plus it sounded like you needed to plan this in advance. It probably would have been a fun way to see more of the island. The Utah Geotour cache that is located here was hidden in one of the old covered wagons.  We felt a a bit self conscious looking the thing over so closely but there were not too many visitors that morning and I suspect the volunteers all know about it by now.

Bison as We Head to Ranch

Chris Practices Her Roping Skills to Catch a Bison

Horses Off Duty

The volunteer at the ranch mentioned that the last reported location of the larger herd of bison was just a mile or so down the dirt road further to the south. The chance to see some more bison got us to head that way. We didn't need to go very far before we saw one other car pulled over and a dozen or more bison on each side of the road. The whole herd appeared to be heading up the hill which would mean the ones on the low side of the road should be crossing the road, it was just a matter of how long was it going to take. They didn't seem to be in any hurry but they also didn't seem to mind, or even acknowledge, our presence on their island. It didn't take more than 10 minutes for one of them to head across the road. Once it had, we got in the relative safety of our car and headed down the road to where it was. Seeing one this big only 15 feet or so from us was awesome.

Why Did the Bison Cross the Road?

Grazing

Big!

Next we headed to the visitor center on the north end of the island. The interesting fact we discovered was that there are between 500 and 750 bison on the island! Each fall they have a roundup where they drive all of them into corrals where they are given vaccines and a health check as well as an ID chip. Afterwards they auction off a hundred or so to keep the herd population stable. That would be a fun thing to watch and might need to be added to our list of things to see and do on a future trip.

We wrap up the day with a trip to the Bountiful/Davis Art Gallery. I know, you're thinking we don't seem like the art gallery types. And while that is generally true, one of the Utah Geotour caches is located there. It's not a huge place with possibly 50 or so paintings and other works of art. The cache container is inside the gallery and we find it reasonably quickly since it really isn't hidden. But the thing has a 5 digit combination lock that needs to be open. The mission is to wander through the gallery and find the five pieces of art that have a small number next to them and rearrange them in the proper order to unlock the cache. We went around the place 3 or 4 times but we weren't finding numbers that made any sense. We finally asked one of the workers and her comment was "Oh, I don't think we put up new numbers since we changed all the art a couple weeks ago." That might explain our frustration in spending 30 minutes and coming up empty handed. Fortunately they were able to provide the number and we had the cache open and signed in no time.

Chalk Art Outside BDAG

Being the capitol of Utah, we head downtown to tour the capitol building. It is a big and impressive place. You are allowed to wander the place on your own. We did have a bit of a tour guide in the sense that the Geotour cache hidden here required you to find 10 locations inside the building on one of the three floors that were often only cryptically identified, and then find a date, or count the number of what was there in order to get the final coordinates for the actual container. It was actually a fun way to see most of the place. There didn't appear to be any state legislators working the day we were there so it wasn't a very busy place.

Utah State Capitol Building

Inside the Dome

One of the Legislative Chambers

State Seal on Floor

The actual cache was hidden in the visitor's center at a separate but nearby building. We found the key needed to unlock it, but had to ask where the container was. It turned out to be located behind the worker's desk area since the gift shop was closed. We talked to the woman working there and she told us we might want to check out Ensign Peak that is up the hill behind the capitol building. It was over a mile up there and somewhat steep so it was a good thing we drove up instead of walked up.  Once there, we found a cache at the lower level of the park and then headed up to the overlook.

The view was pretty good of the city. Another trail took you up a couple hundred additional feet in elevation to the top of the hill but we decided the view was fine from where we were at.

View Above Salt Lake City

At this point in time, we have completed 6 counties in the Utah Geotour. So close but still have four to go. We head head one day to try to get two more counties. We are glad that the ones near Salt Lake City are smaller in size so the task is not too bad. One of the first we attempted was a fun one. At the posted coordinates, you find a tupperware container on a tree with a doorbell button inside. The idea is to push the button and listen for the wireless doorbell located in the woods nearby. The only real problem is the location is very close to the interstate so the noise from the traffic almost drowns out the bell. Initially I overshot the location and could no longer hear the thing. Chris pointed out she could hear it closer to her and I headed back and made the find. We really enjoy finding creative hides like this one.

View of Expressway From Doorbell Cache

At Another Geotour Cache

We had identified a driving loop that would take us past the closest 3 Geotour caches in both counties. Things were going well until we got to the Heber Valley Railroad Station. There were likely at least 100 cars parked here and many more people than that. We headed to the cache location but discovered there was some sort of kids show being put on by an entertainer. We isolated where we believe the cache to be but several children were sitting on the planter where it was hidden! It didn't appear that the show was coming to an end any time soon so we packed it in and had to go with plan "B".

To remedy our lack of a find at the railroad station, we headed to Jordanelle State Park. If nothing else, it helped us justify the Utah State Park Pass we had purchased. The park is situated on a reservoir created by a large dam. Many people were here being a nice and warm early summer day. This cache was a bit more challenging. The park had put in plaques representing the sun and each planet of our solar system. The idea was to go from one to the next as you work your way out to the now demoted Pluto. We really expected them to be along some walking path or hiking trail but at each plaque, there were the coordinates for the next one and they were all over the park. In fields with no trails, in the middle of the campgrounds and there was really no good path from one to the next. We eventually walked all the way to Pluto and found the cache at the sign. I suspect that at this point only geocachers visit these places in the park.

Overlooking Dam at Jordanelle SP

Sailing on the Lake

The last place of interest this day was a stop in Park City Utah. This is a very trendy and touristy town. And being a nice weekend day, it was very crowded. The Geotour cache here was a very interesting and well done cache. You were provided with a starting point and 49 small images. The idea was to go to the start and look for the thing in the first picture which gets you going in the right direction. Then you just keep following the pictures. The longest distance between things was maybe 100 feet or so but this is a very busy area with one shop after another lining the streets. Many of the pictures were rather closeup shots of something less than one square foot in real life.

The pictures did a pretty good job of indicating where you needed to turn and cross the street although there were a couple spots where we struggled to find what we needed. The final picture took us to where the actual cache was. It was only off a side walkway from the Main Street, so there were plenty of people passing but they didn't seem to be aware of what we were doing. Maybe they thought we were odd looking homeless people that needed to be avoided.

We had taken the interstate to get over and through the Wasatch Mountains on the east side of SLC. We decided to take a lesser traveled mountain road back when we were done for the day. The drive up Guardsman Pass was pretty, this is a big skiing area. I was amazed the sheer number of rental places. It looks like thousands of people must come here during the peak of the ski season. There was still snow on the ground and it definitely was chillier up here than in town. We stopped at one overlook with three Greyhound size tour buses sitting on the one side of the road. There were a few people milling about but not nearly enough to fill the buses. Not sure where they had headed but it was out of our view. Unfortunately we got further up and discovered the road we had planned to take was still closed from snow cover. We eventually made out way back to the KOA.

Chris Checks Out the Snow

Impressive Views

More Mountains

We still had a couple Geotour caches to get in Salt Lake county and had picked out a museum in town dedicated to Leonardo DaVinci. It sounded interesting so we headed there Sunday morning. BAD idea. Turns out there was the annual Gay Pride Parade just a couple blocks away from the place and the whole area was swamped with people and road closures. We eventually realized this just wasn't meant to be and formulated plan "B" again - we seem to need to do this fairly often.

We head back up into the mountains. This time to the small town of Alta. It wasn't clear there was actually a town since it seemed to just be a couple ski resorts including Snowbird. There was still some snow on the mountains and at least one lift running since we saw a few people snowboarding. After solving a bit of a puzzle, we were led to a restaurant. Of course the place wasn't open so we were unsure we could get to the Geotour cache or not. We didn't really have any option for plan "C" so we headed there with our fingers crossed. It took us a bit to find the container but having the place closed worked in our advantage since nobody was around to question what we were up to.

They Had Lots of Snow This Past Season

Great Views

We needed one more cache for this county so we headed to Wheeler Historic Farm. Unlike the desolate ski area we came from, this area was packed. We found it hard to believe this many people were here to walk around the farm. Turned out that there was also some sort of craft fair going on with many dozens of booths setup. To find the cache here, you needed to find half a dozen spots on the farm and answer some questions about what you were looking at. Since we didn't have specific coordinates to head to, you were more or less forced to walk the whole farm. That was okay since it was an interesting place. Had it not been a Sunday, we could have even paid our $1 to milk a cow. It's not clear why the cows don't get milked on Sundays. We eventually get our answers and discover the actual cache location is well off the beaten path so there were no issues looking for it or signing the logbook.

No Milking for You Today

Little Guy

Chris Finds Home Smaller than Our Rig

Nice Barn on the Farm

Nicely Decorated Geocache

We were down to needing one last county but only had one more full day in Utah. We decided to head south of town to Provo. We had driven through it on our way to SLC and thought it might be a good place to visit. Being Monday made for much less traffic at our destinations. Utah Lake State Park was a nice stop. There were lots of people out boating or fishing. A mother and her young daughter were out in the little bay on stand up paddle boards. The girl was not having an easy time keeping up with her mom especially since her board was often facing the wrong direction. I guess I shouldn't laugh since we likely wouldn't even be able to stand up on one of those things!

Mountains Behind Utah Lake

Near Utah Lake SP

This Guys is Good at Collecting Gas Memorabilia

From here we head to downtown Provo basically to just walk around and see what is there. We use several of the more favorite geocaches as our tour guide. The Startup Candy Company sounded better than it was. It is a neat old building but they are more into lollipops than chocolate.

Pretty Church in Downtown Provo

Part of Startup Candy

The drive up to Sundance was pretty. It is in the mountains northeast of Provo. Yes this is the place owned and made famous by Robert Redford. It consists of several thousand acres where there are year round activities. The chair lifts were still running but carrying people and their mountain bikes up to the top. There were others doing the zip line course. This looks like an expensive place to stay. We were definitely underdressed compared to most of the visitors. We checked out all the pictures of the history of this place and Redford's involvement. We then managed to find the Geotour cache hidden here and talked to one of the artists working nearby it. There were no Robert Redford sightings while we were there.

Chair Lift Still Running

Great Views at Sundance

We successfully hit our goal of finding at least three of the Geotour caches in ten counties in Utah. We were in the state for 26 nights and found tackling this challenge was fun and took us to some places we likely would have otherwise missed. To get our "prize" for completing this, we needed to fill out a form on a web site for each county we completed. Part of what they wanted to know was how much we spent while in Utah. We probably spent more than many people that come here for the Geotour but we probably would have spent this much whether we did these caches. Our patches and coin will be mailed to our Florida address but I will post pictures of them when they eventually catch up with us.