The Copper industry really has a big presence here in Salt Lake City. From the mining website:
“Our Kennecott mine is a world-class, integrated copper mining operation located just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, in the US. Kennecott has been mining and processing minerals from the rich ore body of the Bingham Canyon Mine since 1903, and today it’s one of the top producing mines in the world. Our operation includes a concentrator, smelter and refinery and tailings storage facility.”
You can tour the mine but we just don’t have time.
Everything is really big here – the Amazon warehouses, the FedEx warehouses, the churches. But the city feels to me like a little LA with too much money and too little. All surrounded by mountains.
I feel like the tv series Paradise (where they build a community in the Colorado mountains to withstand a nuclear war and start over) is more likely to be set in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City. It’s definitely a good location for it.
The Crater is a geothermal spring, hidden within a 55-foot tall, beehive-shaped limestone rock located on the Homestead property.
Over 10,000 years in the making, The Crater formed when melting snow on the Wasatch Mountains seeped deep within the earth. Two miles below the surface, the earth’s interior heated the water. As it percolated upward, it picked up minerals, which were then deposited on the surface — eventually forming the volcano-shaped limestone deposit called The Homestead Crater.
The hole at the top of the dome lets in sunlight and fresh air while the interior stays heated by the mineral water at a constant range of 90 – 96 degrees Fahrenheit.
Utah Capitol Tour
70% of people in Utah live within 50 miles of Salt Lake City.
Seagull is the state bird because they saved the day by eating the locust that were eating all the crops of the settlers.
Highlights of the Utah Capitol Tour:
Isla: standing in the middle of the rotunda and looking at all the paintings
Caleb: Learning about the earthquake protection that was installed in the early 2000s. They dug out all underneath the Capitol building and put in cylinder stabilizers that are a layer of rubber then steel over and over again with a lead core. There are around 260 of them under the building. In Salt Lake City they are worried about earthquakes because they are near a fault line that scientists say could cause earthquakes. When most the buildings were built in the 1800s they didn’t know they had to be worried about earthquakes.
Joel: Seeing the architecture and how big it is. All of the marble and granite. Mostly that they built the whole thing in 3 years.
Tracy: It was interesting seeing the paintings on the ceiling and walls that are scenes out of movies and tv shows we watch. It is a good reminder that these movies are someone’s version of what actually happened to real people. I can’t remember the name of the TV show on one of the steaming things – it was all about the settlers, Mormons, First Nations and army fighting over the land along the Oregon trail and Utah. Can someone remind me of the name? I for sure watched it within the last year. EDIT: American Primeval is the show!
“Morton maintains multiple solar salt facilities from which it can harvest and produce Sea Salt. For example, located alongside the largest saline lake in North America – The Great Salt Lake, Morton Salt’s Grantsville, Utah facility harvests sea salt from the billions of tons of salt already dissolved in the waters of The Great Salt Lake. The natural replenishment of salt from local rainwater and snow melt makes it an ideal climate for natural solar evaporation.”
We left the Bonneville Salt Flats and are now in Nevada. We are now in the Pacific Time Zone so three hours behind home. Plan is to drive as long as we are happy and then sleep in a parking lot.
The I80 westbound is sure windy as we drive through Nevada. Joel’s not worried about it. Caleb is beyond exhausted. Isla is happily listening to music.