Category Archives: Utah

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

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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

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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

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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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