Day 16: Salt Lake City

We started the morning today by going back to Temple Square.  We were careful to avoid the visitors centers this time, but Alex wanted to see the roof of the conference center.  It is: a roof with plants on it.  Trees on one side, wild prairie flowers on the other.  And a couple of fountains.  AND the conference center contains upper tiers of seating for about ten thousand with no internal support beams.  Kind of amazing that the building doesn't collapse.

Since we were parked right next to it, we also popped in to the LDS history and art museum.  The art is super tacky with a big emphasis on all the cultures of the world, which I felt kind of ironic since the church didn't allow Blacks to fully participate in the sacraments until 1978.  But not as ironic as the big sampler from South Africa that read "The Mormon Creed Is To Mind Your Own Business".  I guess the folks working in the visitors center haven't gotten around to seeing the museum yet.  There was also some children's drawings in the basement, which was actually my favorite part of the art display:

The history section was a lot more interesting.  I learned that Mormons lived in co-ops with Utopian names like Orderville (seriously, we even drove through it a few days later) that printed their own money since they were short on actual cash.  It looked like every single dollar bill was signed by Brigham Young.

We also watched a video about a woman (Jane Rio Baker, if you want to Google her) who traveled from London to Utah in the 19th century to join the church.  I thought it was interesting to hear the details of what it took to get that far, and her journal excerpts were quite good.  Alex thought it made her look kind of crazy, but even though it took her 9 months she was happy in the end because only one of her family members died along the way.  After wrapping up the section on 19th century pioneer life, we skipped the bit on every leader of the church, and headed out to the Great Salt Lake.

The Great Salt Lake is amazing.  And terrible.  It is repulsive and fascinating all at once.  I knew from Tripadvisor to expect flies and a funny smell rather than a beautiful lakefront, but it didn't prepare me at all for what I saw.


First, there is mud.  When people walk in the mud they leave footprints that fill in with salt water that then slowly evaporates, so each footprint's muddy puddle has a thick layer of salt crusted on the surface, like ice on partially frozen water.  You can pick these sheets up and put them in the water and watch them (temporarily) melt.  There are crystaline ice formations that look like frost on a windowpane, small ones and huge ones alike.

And then there are the birds.  The beach is littered with hundreds of dead birds in various stages of skeletal-ness.  From my experience at Fossil Butte, I am pretty sure that a bunch of them are going to become very pretty fossils...you can see them half buried under the sand already, feathers intact.  There are so many that you have to watch carefully so you don't step on them.  According to news reports, there were big die-offs in 2008 and 2009, from avian cholera and botulism.

So the resulting experience is pretty amazing.  It's not pleasant at all, but it's totally fascinating.

Below: Dead bird

Also, next to the beach we were at, there was a concert venue (under construction) that for no apparent reason had a gift shop selling salt water taffy and stuff, and it was open.  It was your typical store that sells to tourists except I cannot imagine tourists going to the lake--at least that part--to buy taffy.  It was like if somebody were selling I Heart New Orleans keychains inside a condemned house in the remains of the Lower 9th Ward.

After leaving the lake and getting as much mud off of our shoes as possible, we hopped in the car and headed south along I-15 to Bryce Canyon.  We arrived in time to take in a ranger program at the park.  During the first part, a ranger gave a presentation on weather patterns of other planets in the solar system.  (He also reflected that working in Bryce was better than Yosemite because no visitors commit suicide in Bryce.)  It was a bit scary to see that (at least theoretically, although the temperature changes probably wouldn't be extreme enough in practice) global warming type effects could lead to a runaway reaction that could turn an Earth-like planet into a Venus-like planet.  We then got to see a number of planets and stars, including Venus, Mars, Saturn (the last under a telescope...it honestly looked like a stylized icon of Saturn), and a few galaxies (also with a telescope...the light was wrong for the Milky Way, unfortunately).