About Michael

Michael Grass is the founding co-editor of DCist.com, the founding editor of The Huffington Post's HuffPostDC.com and has worked in a variety of editing and newsroom management jobs at Washington City Paper, Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill, The Washington Post's Express newspaper and The New York Observer's Politicker.com. He's a published contributor to "Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology" (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Avoiding ‘Tractionless Grit’ and Dust Devils in the Great Salt Lake Desert

The Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

The Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

WENDOVER, Utah — Leaving Salt Lake City on Interstate 80 heading deep into the desert, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As a child, I used to pore over my well-worn Rand McNally road atlases and was always curious about this part of the United States.

There were few labeled locations. And while there were some named mountain ranges, these maps lacked any detail pertaining to the true nature of the terrain, leaving me to imagine what was out here. National Geographic maps, naturally, were generally better at providing topographical detail, but they too couldn’t be a substitute for actually being there in person.

In the Rand McNally atlases, the course of the red-, blue- and black-colored roads gave some clue of the shape of the landscape. The more twists and turns in a road generally meant more difficult terrain to traverse.

The more straight sections signaled some sort of valley or relatively flat plain, but that’s not always indicative. Most roads in Iowa, for instance, are straight but they can cross some surprisingly hilly, undulating territory as I discovered earlier during my travels along the Lincoln Highway.

Western Utah is the physical manifestation of emptiness. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Western Utah is the physical manifestation of emptiness. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Looking at the road atlas in my youth, I-80 between one point west of the Great Salt Lake and the Nevada border was completely straight for roughly 45 miles. In the 120 miles between Salt Lake City and the state line, the atlas showed little evidence of any human settlement along I-80.

Places like this naturally spark curiosity. Who in their right mind would venture out here? For most travelers, this has been a place to quickly travel across and not linger for fear the forces of the desert will somehow eat you up or rob you of life-sustaining water.

Although I’ve been in the American Southwest on previous visits, the only comparative drive of complete and utter desolation I’ve had was crossing the Mojave Desert on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas on a roadtrip in August 2001. And that stretch was driven at night when the darkness hid the landscape.

My rental car had been running great the entire trip along the Lincoln Highway, so I had little fear of getting stranded out in the middle of nowhere. Still, I stocked up on bottled water and some snacks, just in case.

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‘This Is the Right Place’ for ‘One of Obama’s Spies’ to Stop for Lunch

Salt Lake City, as seen in 1913 (Photo by Johnson Co. via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division >>)

Salt Lake City, as seen in 1913 (Photo by Johnson Co. via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division >>)

SALT LAKE CITY — There are only a handful of major cities in the United States where travelers get to enjoy a dramatic descent on a major highway down from the mountains into a broad urbanized valley below. Denver is probably the best example, where drivers headed east out of Colorado’s Front Range on Interstate 70 are presented not only with the vast expanse of the metropolitan area, but the endless horizon of the Great Plains beyond.

In Utah, I was expecting something similar heading down into Salt Lake City out of the Wasatch Range along Interstate 80. But Parleys Canyon only gives westbound drivers a partial glimpse of the Salt Lake Valley. This is a route that anyone who has skied or gone to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City has most likely experienced. The canyon narrows in its final stretch into Salt Lake City, so instead of seeing an uninterrupted view of the valley below, travelers are treated to a succession of exit signs for Interstate 215’s Belt Route amid the steep canyon walls with, in my case, bright blue skies above.

What was beyond briefly remained a mystery. When I popped out in South Salt Lake, the view wasn’t all that impressive. I could have been somewhere in Southern California.

Not counting my diversion to Boulder, Colo., Salt Lake City has been the largest populated area I’ve been in since I raced through the suburbs of Chicago, nearly 1,500 miles to the east.

When I rolled into Utah’s largest city, I wasn’t exactly inspired to declare “This is the right place,” as Brigham Young apparently said when his eyes first saw the Salt Lake Valley from the foothills of Emigration Canyon. But it was at least the right place to stop for lunch.

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The All-Important Echo Canyon

Echo Canyon, Utah (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Echo Canyon, Utah (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Welcome to Utah! (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Welcome to Utah! (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

ECHO, Utah — After hundreds and hundreds of miles of mostly flat terrain, crossing the border from Wyoming into Utah provides much-needed visual variation for the eyes.

This is where the Lincoln Highway, following Interstate 80 and the former Mormon Trail and Pony Express Trail, begins its descent into the Great Basin and Salt Lake Valley by heading into Echo Canyon, a stunningly beautiful stretch of territory flanked by towering red cliffs and rock formations.

For those familiar with the Oregon Trail video game, the path to the promised land in the Willamette Valley has already turned northwest from Fort Bridger in Wyoming toward Fort Hall in Idaho. Today’s U.S. 30, which carries the majority of the Lincoln Highway all the way from Philadelphia, similarly has left Interstate 80 in western Wyoming and roughly follows the old Oregon Trail westward.

If a similar video game were ever made of the Mormon Trail, Echo Canyon would be the final leg in completing the great overland journey. If the game also involved some military strategy, this is where the Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley would have fended off federal troops in the mid-to-late 1850s.

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Unwelcome Signs in Wyoming

Heading westward toward sunset, somewhere along Interstate 80 in southern Wyoming (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Heading westward toward sunset, somewhere along Interstate 80 in southern Wyoming (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

EVANSTON, Wyo. — Traveling across Wyoming’s southern tier, I had one destination in mind: a hotel bed. Originally, my plan was to drive all the way from my mid-trip relaxation stop at Boulder, Colo., to Salt Lake City, but when a friend in Colorado asked me whether I knew “that’s a really, really long way” to do solo, I decided to reassess my options. I did, after all, want to make a few stops along the way and take the longer, more scenic drive along the Lincoln Highway’s original route via Medicine Bow.

I decided that Evanston, a city established when the Union Pacific Railroad pressed west through this part of Wyoming in the late 1860s, would be a good stopping-off point. It would still necessitate a long driving day because there is no such thing as a quick trip anywhere in Wyoming.

Like many towns along the transcontinental railroad, Evanston once had a sizable Chinese population in its early years. In fact, there have been archaeological excavations of Evanston’s former Chinatown which uncovered materials belonging to Chinese women, who were always a rarity in these male-dominated communities along the railroad.

According to Western Wyoming Community College:

The most distinctive pieces of jewelry recovered during excavations that can be attributed to women are earrings. Photographs of Chinese women in Evanston show women wearing earrings similar to the ones uncovered in excavation. Other jewelry items uncovered in excavation are less useable as indicators of gender. However, the earrings recovered, as well as the other jewelry items uncovered, come from one living space that posses an internal courtyard. Based on the gold, silver, Ming Dynasty ceramics, jade fragments, variety and number of coins recovered, and shear quantity of artifacts found in this one area, we contend that the occupants had a relatively high economic status–especially when compared to the Chinese coal miner’s quarters north of Evanston at Almy and even railroad laborers homes inside the Evanston Chinatown.

The history of Chinese laborers building the transcontinental railroad and the industries they served along the route is a decidedly unhappy one, especially in Wyoming.

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A Place to Appreciate the Power of Emptiness

(Photo by Michael E. Grass)

The view of the Medicine Bow Mountains near Walcott, Wyo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

WALCOTT, Wyo. — I’ve never been to Montana to see Big Sky Country but from the looks of the things, Wyoming could rightfully claim that title, too. On my way west from Laramie, I could have simply stuck to Interstate 80 and taken a shorter route through the southern tier of Wyoming.

But the Lincoln Highway bends north, roughly following the Union Pacific Railroad around the Medicine Bow Mountains before eventually rejoining I-80 to cross the Great Divide Basin. Many Lincoln Highway enthusiasts are adamant about taking the old, slower route. I can see why.

Thus far along my trek, this stretch of land might be the most impressive geography along the route. And this is where the combination of light, sky, clouds and topography were finally in harmony and my smartphone was able to capture the true grandeur of the territory.

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(Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Looking southwest along the Lincoln Highway near Walcott, Wyo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Because I was off I-80, I had an easier time making brief pitstops to enjoy this landscape. I was also mostly alone out here — passing cars were few and far between — so I essentially had this beautiful land all to myself.

In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck wrote:

From the beginning of my journey, I had avoided the great high-speed slashes of concrete and tar called “thruways,” or “superhighways.” … These roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders.

Bosler, Wyo. (Photo by Flickr user afiler via CC BY-SA 2.0 >>)

An abandoned school in Bosler, Wyo. (Photo by Flickr user afiler via CC BY-SA 2.0 >>)

This original route travels through the mostly abandoned settlement of Bosler, where, according to American Road, “the last souls packed up and left, leaving a ghost village of empty mobile homes and scrawny shacks” when I-80 opened in 1971.

I can understand why economics would drive most people out of this great land. And part of me is thankful that it did so I could enjoy this expanse on my own with few distractions.

There are, for sure, many places like this across the American West, but I want to think that this part of Wyoming could be the greatest, grandest and most impressive territory that anyone seeking to understand the power of emptiness could ever discover.

(Photo by Michael E. Grass)

This is a beautiful place. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

You Can Always Spot a Former Long John Silver’s Location

This looks like a former Long John Silver's location. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

This looks like a former Long John Silver’s location. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Before driving through town, I didn’t know much about Wyoming’s third-largest city except that it was the home of the University of Wyoming and the site where Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in 1998. After I passed through Laramie on my way west, I didn’t know much more than when I came.

This is where the Lincoln Highway, following U.S. 30, diverges from Interstate 80 for roughly 95 miles before reconnecting near the dusty unincorporated settlement of Walcott.

Laramie’s downtown, set on a grid of square blocks east of the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, seemed relatively charming, but there wasn’t much here that compelled me to go out to explore.

On my way into town, however, a place called the Teriyaki Bowl caught my attention for an odd reason: It had the classic characteristics of a Long John Silver’s franchise location.

It had a symmetrical pseudo-Colonial design with exterior wooden planks arranged vertically, a cupola on the roof and two doors flanking a squared-off bay window. There’s nothing inherent in this cookie-cutter design that screams out “I am a place that pretends to be dockside where you can get fried fish, tartar sauce, buttered corn-on-the-cob nibblers and hush puppies,” but for most Americans familiar with 1970s and 1980s suburban corridors, this standard design is something instantly identified with Long John Silver’s.

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Lincoln at the Lincoln Highway’s Highest Point

At a rest area along east of Laramie, Wyo., a towering statue of Abraham Lincoln is visible from Interstate 80. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

At a rest area along east of Laramie, Wyo., a towering statue of Abraham Lincoln is visible from Interstate 80. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

2013-06-17 14.41.34LARAMIE, Wyo. — Heading westward from Iowa, there are fewer and fewer signs marking the route of the Lincoln Highway. This is especially true in Wyoming, where significant sections of Interstate 80 west of Cheyenne were simply built over the original Lincoln Highway.

But Wyoming is home to a gigantic Abraham Lincoln monument along the route at the highway’s highest point, 8,835 feet at the Summit Rest Area on Sherman Hill.

The 16th president’s bust looks down on Interstate 80 from the top of a tall column built out of stones. The sound of the highway echos up to the Lincoln statue, especially as the sputtering of truck engine brakes cuts across the monotone hum of vehicular traffic.

According to RoadsideAmerica.com:

Lincoln’s head was built by Wyoming’s Parks Commission to honor Lincoln’s 150th birthday. It was sculpted by Robert Russin, a University of Wyoming art professor and a Lincoln fan (When he died in 2007, his ashes were interred in the hollow monument). The head originally was perched at Sherman Summit, 8,878 feet above sea level, the highest point along the old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway. When I-80 was completed in 1969, the head was moved here — losing a couple of hundred feet (and any eponymous rationale for existing, really) but gaining a vast new audience.

Another monument to the Lincoln Highway near Laramie, Wyo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Another monument to the Lincoln Highway near Laramie, Wyo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Adjacent to the Lincoln monument is a marker dedicated to Packard Motor Company president Henry B. Joy, the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association.

The road up to this point from Cheyenne, which sits at roughly 6,000 feet, travels across the high plains. This is what Colorado’s Front Range must have looked like before suburbia. The landscape here is certainly majestic and my photos don’t do the topography justice. It’s broad. It’s easy for the eyes to gaze out over the vast expanse.

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‘Living the Legend’ in Cheyenne

 Chief Washakie outside the Wyoming State Capitol building in Cheyenne. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Chief Washakie outside the Wyoming State Capitol building in Cheyenne. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

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Wyoming’s state seal sits out front of the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — For the rest of my Lincoln Highway trek from the East Coast to San Francisco, I’ll be visiting Salt Lake City, Carson City and Sacramento, state capitals I’ve never been to before. But first, there’s Cheyenne, capital of the Equality State. This was my first time in Wyoming.

As someone who lives in the nation’s capital, I’m not the first person to point out that Wyoming’s population is smaller than the District of Columbia, yet citizens in the Equality State have two senators and representation in the House of Representatives while those of us in D.C. lack full and equal representation in Congress.

D.C.’s disenfranchisement and periodic federal meddling into local affairs has been the product of the U.S. Constitution and something that’s proven difficult to change over the decades. But enough about the nation’s capital, I’m in Wyoming’s capital city and largest city, with roughly 60,000 people.

While cosmopolitan Denver and its Front Range suburbs feel like they could fit in well somewhere in California — especially considering the high number of Californians who have migrated to the Centennial State — there’s no mistaking Cheyenne for being a true city of the American West. All you have to do is look for cowboy boots and hats.

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Make Way for the Wind Turbines

The train carrying wind turbine blades had some trouble passing through Fort Collins, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

The train carrying wind turbine blades had some trouble passing through Fort Collins, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — On my way north out of Colorado to link back up with the Lincoln Highway’s route through Wyoming and onward west to San Francisco, I followed U.S. 287 into this city of roughly 145,000 people, according to the 2010 Census, making it the Centennial State’s fourth-largest city.

Driving north from the Jack Kerouac gas station outside Longmont and into Loveland, where Lincoln Avenue carries northbound traffic through the center of the city, the mountains of the Front Range frame the western horizon. Longs Peak, a 14,255-foot mountain is the highest point in this part of the state, though it’s only Colorado’s 15th-highest.

Peakbagger.com has described the mountain as “a craggy monster with several enormous vertical cliffs, set among the sea of 13,000 foot peaks that make up Rocky Mountain National Park.”

Fort Collins a hub for the northern Front Range, home of Colorado State University‘s flagship campus and a number of great local breweries, including New Belgium Brewing Co., Equinox BrewingOdell Brewing Co. and The Fort Collins Brewery. Anheuser-Busch has a large facility here, too.

It was mid morning and, unfortunately, too early to take a break to sample the local beer. (I have had may fair share of beer brewed by New Belgium over the years.) On my way out of town, I was actually contemplating turning back when a freight train carrying wind-turbine blades blocked my route to Cheyenne, Wyo.

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Jack Kerouac (And Sal Paradise) Slept Near Here

In "On the Road," Jack Kerouac slept on grass outside this gas station, which was moved into Prospect, a planned mixed-used community near Longmont, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise slept on grass outside this gas station, which was moved into Prospect, a planned mixed-used community near Longmont, Colo.
(Photo by Michael E. Grass)

LONGMONT, Colo. — When Sal Paradise, the narrator and main character in Jack Kerouac‘s quasi-autobiographical novel On the Road, was on his way to Denver, he hitched a ride near Cheyenne, Wyo., from a guy from Connecticut driving cross-country in jalopy and painting along the way.

Taking the Denver-bound road closest to the mountains, Sal ended up here on the outskirts of Longmont for a short time.

Keroauc wrote in On the Road:

Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked if the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure, so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant. And here I am in Colorado! I kept thinking gleefully. Damn damn damn! I’m making it!

To find the relocated Jack Keroac gas station, look for this intersection. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

To find the relocated Jack Keroac gas station, look for this intersection. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

That On the Road gas station is still around according to Brian Butko’s Lincoln Highway Companion. It’s at the corner of Ionosphere Street and Neon Forest Circle at the edge of a mixed-used development near the junction of U.S. 287 and Pike Road.

It was moved here from its former location nearby at the intersection of U.S. 287 and Colorado State Highway 119. As I discovered, the Art Deco-inspired gas station sits vacant, is surrounded by a chain-link fence and does not yet sit on a permanent foundation.

Modern-day U.S. 287 is a six-lane divided highway that runs along Colorado’s Front Range and along the eastern flank of the gas station’s new home. According to the Lincoln Highway Association’s official map, the Lincoln Highway’s Colorado Loop through Denver follows today’s U.S. 287 or parallel roads nearby.

This is the way Kerouac (and Sal Paradise) would have used traveling between Cheyenne and Denver. This route passes through Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont and Broomfield, but stays to the east of Boulder.

While there’s still some rich agricultural land and open space in this corridor, the greater expanse of Front Range suburbia encroaches along the route. During Kerouac’s time here, this area would have been considerably more rural.

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