Rowkin Rovings Blog

Let us just say that it was not a fond farewell to Best Western at Beaver in Utah. The town did remind us of Deliverance Country – eeek.

We excelled this morning and were on the road by 8.30am hitting the I15 just under 80mph – yeap, you read correctly. The Interstate highways have a max speed of 80mph but it is only a guideline. We sit on 75mph and everyone passes us at exceedingly fast rates of knots except the truckers. The truckers are only allowed to go 70mph.

The highways are generally in very good condition and luckily for us there has been no snow on them – yet! We still have the high mountain passes in northern Idaho and Montana to go yet and that is when we will more likely than not experience poor driving and road conditions.

Subie sits on 75mph very comfortably but any faster and she sounds like a rubber band being wound up tight and about to break, so we decide it is not a good idea to push our luck, plus we aren’t really comfortable going any quicker.

So, it was boring highway driving for the first three hours of our trip to Salt Lake City. We seemed to start on the outskirts of the city an hour before we got into the center. After we left the center, it took us another hour to get out into the countryside again. It is located in a valley and there is a huge lake that it partly borders. The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth largest terminal lake in the world.

A not so fun fact about The Great Salt Lake:

In 2021, after years of sustained drought and increased water diversion upstream of the lake, it fell to its lowest recorded area at 950 square miles (2,500 km²), falling below the previous low set in 1963. Continued shrinkage could turn the lake into a bowl of toxic dust, poisoning the air around Salt Lake City.

Most of us know about Salt Lake City and the Mormons and their amazing temple.  As luck would have it, the temple is currently under a four-year extensive renovation due to seismic issues – in other words, its foundations are sinking. So, this is the view we got of it – all under scaffolding.

This is what it should have looked like – bugger. You can see the roundish building just behind it – this is called the Tabernacle, and we did manage to get a photo of that.

Now a historic building on Temple Square, the Salt Lake Tabernacle is still used for overflow crowds during general conference. It is renowned for its remarkable acoustics and iconic pipe organ. It would have been nice to stay for a tour but with Toque in tow and our timing – it wasn’t going to work.

We noticed a half dozen blocks away this building, so we made a beeline for it. We thought we were back in Washington DC looking at the Capitol building but it is the state capital building for Utah.

The size of it took us by surprise. The population of Utah is only 3.2 million people as of the census in 2020. The population of metro Salt Lake City is just under 200,000 which is remarkably small. It is beautifully maintained like most of the city. Driving in from the outskirts there appeared to be a huge boom going on as not only were there many new cookie cutter suburbs but there was a lot of new construction of support infrastructure and service industries.

Utah is home of the largest open cut mine in the world that has been going since 1848 and is on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. We were going to make a deviation and go and see it but as it is high up in elevation and we could see a lot of snow from the highway, we decided that getting bogged in snow wasn’t going to be a particularly smart thing to do.

It was back in the car and onwards to Idaho – no, the scenery did not change and neither did the speed limit. All up, we did 6 hours of commuting today which was relatively easy though boring as bat shit. Other Canadians have told us that they can drive from Edmonton (3 hours north of Calgary) to Phoenix in three straight days – that is 1,727 miles or 2,780 km. That is one post that we do not have to touch.

So pretty much a straight line north today.

Our motel tonight is in the center of Idaho Falls along the Snake River. We got in early enough to dress up warmly and take Toque along the River Walk to shake out all the cobwebs. We all felt a lot better for it!!!