Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

This Is The Place

Salt Lake City, UT - 2 October

Point Zero
The rest of today's photos are here.

"It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on."
- Brigham Young (attrib), July 24 1847

History records "This is the place" as the words used by Brigham Young to indicate to his fellow Mormon settlers that he'd had enough of riding in the back of a covered wagon with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and that they might as well build their new home in the valley which they had just entered, by the Great Salt Lake. It's since become a kind of unofficial slogan for the city and the state, as well as being the title of the state's official song (the lyrics to which it's best to draw a veil over).

So it came to be that the Mormon settlers built what became Salt Lake City, having been driven west to escape first a spot of bother in Illinois (where Mormon church founder Joseph Smith was shot dead by vigilantes) and then a bit of church in-fighting. The states further east also did not take well to polygamy, which Young himself practiced with zeal - marrying (although not legally under US law) a total of fifty women during his life. A canny soul, Young on one occasion exploited the fact that polygamous marriages were not legal to avoid paying alimony to an ex-wife by pointing out in court that as they had never been legally married he could not be liable to pay maintenance. It has to be mentioned at this point that contrary to myth, polygamy is not practiced today by Mormons - it was essentially given up at the end of the nineteenth century in exchange for admission to US statehood.

"Oh, him? He's harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS."
- James T. Kirk (attrib.), Star Trek IV.

It's certainly hard to escape from signs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (mercifully and universally abbreviated to LDS) in modern Salt Lake, so I headed downtown to take a look at the Church's spiritual home, Temple Square. This surprisingly compact complex lies at the centre of the original city, at the origin of the city's grid system, and at the centre of Utah's political and social life ever since Mormon settlers arrived. There are two particularly significant buildings here. The first is the actual Temple itself. This was built to the specifications of Young himself and is actually quite an imposing building - more so because the interior remains firmly off-limits to non-members of the LDS Church. The larger and more astonishing building next door is the enormous LDS headquarters building - 26 floors of offices and administration. I don't think the Church of England has anything this vast on its books.

There are other things around the square - most notably the surprisingly small Mormon Tabernacle, home of the Choir of that ilk and currently closed for refurbishment. There's also a lavishly-appointed visitor's centre full of displays about the LDS church, with assorted Elders and Sisters around to lead tours and answer questions. All the people I spoke to were perfectly friendly and more interested in talking about the buildings than religion, although I get the impression that if I'd shown any interest at all in that side of things they'd have been extremely happy to advise. Fortunately, as I decided many years ago to follow a cheerful fence-sitting form of agnosticism that just involves being nice to people and not beating up old ladies, fare-dodging, voting Conservative or drinking more than 6 pints of beer in an evening I didn't feel any need for further spiritual fulfilment. Furthermore, I don't want this travelogue to turn into a tedious discussion of comparative religion - as far as I'm concerned, whatever rings your bell in the line of religion or the lack thereof is fine with me, although I did find it a bit strange to find myself looking at a lot of the people around me and thinking "I know what sort of underwear you're wearing.".

One thing becomes very clear when looking around Temple Square, though - the LDS Church is very wealthy. There are clear advantages to titheing your members' income, although I can't see the C of E getting away with trying that one.

After taking a bunch of photos of what are really a fairly impressive collection of buildings, I repaired to the Borders which stands across the road from the square to have a latte in the café upstairs which has a nice view across the square. Mormons aren't allowed to drink tea, coffee or alcohol, so I was amused to find that they gave me an extra shot of espresso for free as "we'd only waste it otherwise". Later on, suffering slightly from the caffeination brought on by drinking a 4-shot latte I found myself wondering if that prohibition might in fact not be such a bad idea after all.

Salt Lake

Welcome to Utah!
The rest of today's photos are here.

Down in Utah the guys and I dig a city called Salt Lake
It's got the grooviest kids, that's why we never grow tired of Salt Lake
And the way the kids talk so cool is an out of sight thing
And the number one radio station makes the town really swing, yeah
Salt Lake City - we'll be coming soon

Brian Wilson wrote these lyrics for the 1965 Beach Boys album Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), which is more famous for including well-known classics like California Girls and Let Him Run Wild than it is for hymns of praise to a city that's most famous for being synonymous with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.. It's an infectious tune with a thumpingly good backing track, so I wasn't too surprised when it popped into my head earlier today as I bumbled along I-15. I haven't been able to verify Brian's claim yet, but will have a look around town sometime in the next day or two and will report back on its level of out-of-sightness and on how cool the kids talk. From what I can work out the number one radio station's the venerable KSL, which dates back to 1922. Nowadays it's a talk radio station, and was hosting an enthusiastic discussion about Mormon woman writers as I was driving into town. The other Salt Lake station I listened to on the way up was the local NPR station, which was broadcasting the insufferably twee Prairie Home Companion. I guess that whether either of these make the town really swing or not is a matter of opinion.

Most of the rest of today was taken up with getting here. Sometimes I forget just how big the USA is, and today was one of those days which reminds me of just how big even one state is. I-70 cuts through some very empty landscapes - there's basically nothing out there in the east and south-east of the state. It's a fantastic, desolate lunar landscape, hot and empty. For a lot of the journey the only man-made object visible from the road is the Union Pacific Railroad.

The railway was, of course, there a long time before the road was. It's astonishing to realise that when the railway was built there was basically nothing there (other than the Native Americans who were one of the major casualties of the expansion west), and marvel at the logistical, human and engineering feats needed to build railways across America in the nineteenth century. Men with shovels and pickaxes worked in intense heat and freezing snow, in an unremittingly harsh environment. Simply keeping them all fed must have been a major logistical exercise - while the sections of line which had been built could be used to bring supplies, it all still points to a massive undertaking. Having seen the type of terrain which the railway was driven though only reinforced my amazement at the scale of such projects. I must do the cross-country rail journey one day..

The countryside gets a bit more populated along US-6 as it cuts up the Price River valley, and then after joining I-15 the road enters urban Utah proper as it rounds the Utah Lake past Provo. The Salt Lake City area is a large, sprawling American city (the Great Salt Lake itself is to the northwest), divided into various satellite towns as well as the city itself. The whole area's streets are numbered on a huge grid system that provides Cartesian coordinates for anywhere in the greater SLC area, based around axes with the origin at Temple Square. This is a usefully functional system, as you can immediately tell where, say, 150 W 4500 S is located. My personal view is that it would be clearer to express the above location as (150,-4500), but that might be just a bit too nerdy.

Utah!

Delicate Arch
The rest of today's photos are here.

American states tend to have little slogans on their car license plates. Arkansas, for example, claims to be The Natural State. Texas is, of course, The Lone Star State, Massachusetts thumps the tub a bit by claiming to be The Spirit Of America, while Idaho goes with the surreal Famous Potatoes. Until recently Utah's plates said Ski Utah!, but as the Ski was hard to read, at a distance the plates just seemed to say Utah!. Why, I thought, did Utah need an exclamation mark (or, as Bill Bryson would probably say, an ejaculation) to advertise itself?

This question was answered for me today when I went and visited southern Utah. The red sandstone landscape is surreal and beautiful, and the number of exclamations I made when rounding a corner to find yet another breathtaking screech-to-a-halt-and-grab-the-camera vista more than justified that exclamation mark on the license plates. It is, in short, just gorgeous. Hot, but gorgeous.

I started the day fairly gently with a spin through Colorado's Grand Mesa National Forest, across the eponymous mesa which claims to be the largest flat-topped mountain in the world. It's about 3000 metres above sea level, and to my surprise was still densely wooded at that altitude. There are numerous small lakes, beautiful views a-plenty, and right now the leaves are beginning to turn and produce some lovely autumn colours. It's a beautiful part of the world, and I found myself thinking just how lucky Americans are to have such a wide variety of landscapes available within their own country. The national parks and national forests are well cared for and looked after, and are really something to be proud of. And there was no shortage of visitors either, which is even better.

Heading back to US-50 via Cedaredge (where the apple festival was going on, so town was a little busy) I ambled back up to Grand Junction and west into Utah on I-70. My plan was to head for Arches National Park and take a few photos. Arches is known for - you guessed it - its natural sandstone arches. The whole of south-eastern Utah is like something out of the Roadrunner cartoons, and among the pinnacles of red rock, canyons and rocks balanced precariously on other rocks I was half-expecting to see Wile E. Coyote stalking past with a large crate from the Acme Corporation. Cartoon coyotes aside, the combination of the red sandstone, blue skies and sparkly waters of the Colorado River in the canyons along state highway 128 to Moab is gorgeously beautiful, and the weirdly-shaped rock formations led to my stopping a lot to take photos of the strange lunar (or more probably, Martian) landscape. Even more surreally, I saw a motor caravan with Dutch numberplates. Did someone take a wrong turning at Utrecht or something?

Having got to Arches I decided to head to Delicate Arch, one of the best-known of the park's natural arches and a symbol of the state of Utah - it adorns the current (but regrettably ejaculation-free) state license plates. After a stop off for a brief photo-op at probably the most Roadrunner-ish thing in Utah, Balanced Rock, I dumped the car in the trailhead car park, grabbed my bottle of water and camera (there are dire warnings posted at the trailhead pointing out that it's 1.5 miles, entirely uphill and totally without shade all the way to the Arch) and skipped merrily off up the trail. It's quite a nice walk in itself, and at the end of the trail I came round a corner and found that I'd arrived at Delicate Arch. Unfortunately, so had a lot of other people. The place was surprisingly busy for somewhere that could only be reached with a non-trivial walk. I couldn't help but notice how many of the people there were speaking German and assorted Scandinavian languages - while there were plenty of Americans there as well, I suspect that while Joe Sixpack will drive to the lookout point some distance from the arch rather than hiking up to the arch itself, Europeans are a bit more likely to make the walk.

I snapped a couple of photos of the arch and settled down in the shade to wait for sunset. Delicate Arch is well-known for being extremely photogenic in the last minutes before the sun sets - the side of the arch is aligned on a sort of west-south-westerly axis, so the setting sun brings out the detail of the rock and makes the sandstone much redder. A lot of people had lugged tripods and camera bags and (in the case of one group) several takeaway pizzas up to wait for sunset. They didn't offer me a slice, the meanies.

Sunset eventually started to approach, and it soon became apparent that the shoot was not going to be as easy as it could be. There's an unwritten rule that during sunset, to let people get on with taking their pictures in the limited time that's available you don't go and stand in front of the arch or get in the way of the view. You know the kind of thing - "Here's me in front of Delicate Arch at sunset! I couldn't understand why all these people with tripods kept shouting at me!". You can't blame people for not knowing about unwritten rules, but you'd also think that people would be at least a little self-conscious and work it out for themselves. A guy in a red T-shirt and his family decided to get in the way during the crucial couple of minutes, hanging around the arch and being conspicuous. It took surprisingly long for people to start yelling at them to get out of the way, but the frustration was evident in the way that after one person yelled, everyone else joined in...

Anyway, I got my pictures (see top of this entry), and seconds later the arch abruptly stopped being glowing and red and turned dull as the solar disc dropped below the horizon. Feeling energetic and full of the joys of being in such a landscape as that (or maybe it was just paranoia about not wanting to be stuck on the trail when it got properly dark), I found myself running all the way back down to the car. I must have looked like a bit of a berk, but made it in susprisingly good time considering I was wearing normal clothes and carrying a large camera. I was rewarded by arriving back at the trailhead several minutes before anyone else, and then rewarded further when I pulled the car out of the parking lot and immediately got stuck behind a large RV being inexpertly driven by someone who seemed to have the timidity many American drivers have when faced with roads which are curvy, steep or worst of all, curvy and steep. But by golly, Utah is a beautiful place.

Heading to Salt Lake City tomorrow, and will base myself there for a couple of nights. The Holiday Inn Express had an unreasonably good price on offer for a suite with its own hot tub ($79 - try getting a rate like that in the UK), so I couldn't resist the upgrade..

1400m ASL

California Zephyr
Originally uploaded by Mike Knell.

Denver International Airport has to be the only airport I've ever been to where I had to take a train to get to my bags. The airport is ostentatious in size and layout, with a rapid transit thingy connecting the various bits of it. I was pleased to note that notwithstanding the ridiculous amount of time it takes for passengers to get from gate to carousel, the bags still hadn't started appearing by the time we got there. I found my rucksack lurking in the 'oversize baggage' section of the hall and found to my relief that my camera (which I'd accidentally left in there when checking my bag in) was still present, but the top pocket had been opened and presumably rifled for the small change I'd thrown in there (are you supposed to tip baggage handlers too in the States as well as everyone else?). They must have been disappointed as it was pounds sterling rather than quarters and nickels. Then again, the only thing which would have disappointed them more than foreign money would probably be Sacagawea dollar coins, which people here seem to harbour strange and inexplicable loathings for.

It transpired that Hertz didn't have the car I'd reserved - a convertible with their funky Neverlost satellite navigation - but the immensely helpful and friendly Kermit at the desk tried very hard to find one anyway. This pleased me for two reasons - firstly, I'd never met anyone called Kermit before and I think it's an excellent name, and secondly, it was quite superb customer service of the sort which makes me happy on the regrettably rare occasions that it happens to me. But there was still no satellite-guided convertible to be found, so to make up for it Kermit offered me a car that didn't have satnav but was a convertible and was rather nicer than the Mustangs which are Hertz's default convertible. It was mean, it was black, and it was a Toyota Solara. I liked it immensely (not least because it's one of those cars which is quiet enough that even with the roof down you have to rev the engine to see if it's running or not, and even then you have to watch the rev counter rather than listening), threw my bags in the back, bade Kermit a hearty farewell and headed out to the Interstate feeling rather pleased with myself.

It's only (that's the US "only") 240 or so miles from Denver to Grand Junction, where I'd booked myself into the Holiday Inn. I stopped and fortified myself with coffee and junk food at a gas station, and was annoyed to find that the largest size coffee came in was 20 ounces (just short of 600ml in real money) before realising that if I thought that was too small for a cup of coffee, I was in danger of turning into an American. I-70 is dark and winding as it crosses the Rockies, and it didn't help matters that it took me some time to work out that part of the reason it was so dark was that I'd only turned the side lights (and mercifully, tail lights) on. Turning the headlights on instead made things a little easier, but as I was pretty tired after a day's travelling the journey to Grand Junction was still wigglier than I needed it to be. I got to Grand Junction at about 2300 and slept for a long time.

Friday was fairly uneventful - I had some work I needed to get done so stayed in the hotel for most of the day staring at computers. There were small parcels of excitement, though, such as finding out that the hotel had its own miniature launderette and that I wouldn't have to schlep my dirty undies into town to find somewhere to wash them. More importantly than that, I took a couple of hours off in the afternoon to head down to the railway lines near the Amtrak station to take pictures of the westbound California Zephyr as it passed through Grand Junction station. This is a daily service from Chicago to Emeryville (near San Francisco), and takes a jolly long time (about 55 hours in total). However, it's a damn sight more civilised than flying.

I found a spot just up the line from the station and settled down to wait. The train was - as always - running late, and eventually showed up at about 1650, over half an hour after its scheduled departure time. The bustle around the station platform as the train (one of only two services a day, remember) approached and departed with blaring horns and ding-ding-dingy bells was heavily reminiscent of old Westerns, where the sleepy little town only comes to life for 15 minutes a day around the arrival of the train. Once the train had gone and I'd shot about 500000 photos, everything was quiet. I returned to the hotel, did some more work, then casually decided to go for a run.

This place is about 1400 metres (okay, okay, 4600ft) above sea level, so the comparatively short 7km run proved to be quite exciting as my wussy sea-level-trained cardiovascular system struggled in the thin air. After having a shower, I repaired to one of the billion chain restaurants near the hotel and ate a larger portion of ribs than I'd actually imagined could exist (and I can imagine a lot of ribs) before collapsing into bed after doing a bit more work.