Winnemucca to Salt Lake City

We're crossing the West, I promise! Today's episode covers eastern Nevada and Western Utah, ending in Salt Lake City! We'll talk about Basques, the Great Basin, salt, and Utah's lovely hilltop state capitol. 

Transcript

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Hello everybody. Are you ready for this next part of our journey across the country? Today is maybe boring one. A lot of people don't like this part of the drive. Uh, to me, it's very pretty and I love driving across Eastern Nevada, but I think a lot of people just think it's boring. But alas, we have to get through it anyways to get to the Rockies and into the Midwest and onto the Atlantic Ocean. So let's pack our bags and say goodbye to Winnemucca and start driving across the Great Basin. As I mentioned, I love the Great Basin. It really feels like home to me and it flying over it, seeing it, it just means I'm getting closer to home because I grew up on the eastern edge of it. It just means it's very nostalgic, very sentimental for me, but to a lot of people, they just see the grge and the sage brush and the nothingness, and they just say, wake me up when we get somewhere exciting, which I understand. So what is the Great Basin? I think we talk a lot about the Great Basin and it has this very vague, nebulous kind of idea or very, very porous border. But basically it is an area of contiguous endo, aic, watersheds. That word has floated across here on this podcast multiple times because we talk about lakes with no outlets. That's essentially what this means is that the Great Basin is full of valleys where water will run down after rain or the snow, or maybe there are rivers, there are a few, and it fills up a valley, and the only way out of that valley is through evaporation, which is why a lot of the bodies of water also salty. And you can find a lot of mineral deposits in these valleys. However, that doesn't make the great basin boring because interestingly. The highest and lowest points in the lower 48 are within 100 miles of each other in California on the Western Edge. So from Death Valley to Mount Whitney, Both part of this place, both beautiful, but however, I, I still get that people would say it's boring and ugly and, and to each our own, but we're still driving across it. So keep your eyes peeled, especially at sunset because the mountains to the west will create this beautiful black silhouette. Framed against a super colorful sky and because we're gonna find a positive here of no water, clouds can be super rare. Humidity in the summer can actually be down into single digits in the Great basin. The Great Basin, that name was coined by John c Fremont, who explored the area in the early 1840s, and his maps and information were widely used by pioneers and settlers moving west. You could basically call him the Rick Steves of the time, he was able to promote safe ways for thousands of people to cross the unforgiving desert with relative ease. He also disproved the idea that there was a river flowing from the Rockies to the Pacific, thanks to the Sierra Nevada mountains. So we're really just kind of a giant ball on the western edge of the country. The Great Basin was formed because the mantle, the earth's mantle would up well and then collapse back in on itself. And then the crust would thicken and it would create these parallel mountain ranges and valleys. And that is the best way to describe basin and range, because you would have parallels and it goes Mountain Valley, mountain Valley, mountain Valley, mountain Valley for hours on end, hundreds of miles. And this part of the United States is perhaps the. Most iconic basin and range landscape on earth.'cause it's, it does cover such a wide area and it is roughly circular in shape. So it provides a lot of great examples of that. I mean, look at a map on, um, just even random McNally of Nevada and you'll see these, the black names of the mountains, just the type just across and it's parallel. It's far more fun to drive because then you just keep passing Mountain, mountain Valley, mountain Valley, and it sounds boring, but each mountain range is very unique and it looks really pretty depending on the time of day and the way the sun shines on it. As you can tell, I am a fan. One of the cons to this landscape is that because of the way of its formation that it collapsed back in on itself means that there are lots of fault lines running along these mountain ranges and the bottoms of the mountain ranges into the valleys. So Eastern Nevada and Western Utah are prone to earthquakes, which I don't know if I have this later on, but we did have an earthquake. I still live in Utah, and we did have an earthquake in March of 2020. It, everything just kind of all came together. And let me tell you, it was just a five point something. I don't know. And there's people who probably have, who are, who have lived through far worse laughing at this. It is not a great experience, especially when it wakes you up at 7:00 AM because your bed is shaking and then you look around and it's not, it's not your mind playing some trick on you. No. The entire house is shaking and it makes this very distinct noise. And then you run upstairs to watch the news because obviously we're all awake now and the news people are looking freaked out in the studio and then all of a sudden you hear it again and you hear it coming before you feel it, and then the house will shake again. At least we have beautiful sunsets, I guess, right. We all, uh, here in the Great Basin, we are also home to nearly all of the copper mines in the us, which we'll talk about as we get closer to Salt Lake, as well as most of the gold and silver that is being mined today. You can also find a portion of every desert in the United States in the Great Basin area. some of the deserts spill in from other places. But you do get a chance to see a mom. You can tell the Mojave by Joshua Trees. And so when you're driving through St. George, through St. George, through Las Vegas and into Southern California, there's Joshua trees everywhere. That means you're in the Mojave Desert. If you drive from Las Vegas to Phoenix, and you'll start to see the Joshua trees thin out and change into Saguaro cacti, that means in the Sonoran Desert, and then of course in the North portion. Where we don't get any really cool plants like Joshua Trees or Saguaro Cacti. We have to deal with Sagebrush. That's the Great Basin Desert. It's defined as a colder desert. And then there's also the Oregon High Desert on the backside of the Cascades. So if you're a desert lover, it's not Phoenix or Las Vegas, but the rest of it's really pretty. So after a few hours of driving, we're gonna end up in Elco, which just sounds very quintessentially western. And if you're wondering, thinking that Elco is reminiscent of the animal, you are correct. The most accepted version of the history of the city's name is that Charles Crocker, who worked for the Central Pacific Railroad, he liked animal names, and so when they came up, they needed to name the settlement. He said, well, let's name it Elk plus O Elco. Sorry, that's not the most exciting name story and, but that's what happened. Elko today is very famous for being a outpost or a cultural outpost, I would guess to say of the Basque community in the United States. And you may be wondering how do Basques end up in Elco? They're also in Boise, but Elco is where we're driving through. So the Basks started to come to the Western United States as part of the 1849 Gold Rush, along with many, many other people. And like many, many other people, they did not strike it rich as they thought they could. They did, however, find another way to become very. Integrated into the community, but also with a stable income. And that was through sheep herding and ranching. However, there were others who did not like them infringing on the land, but also did not like the fact that they were raising sheep, because sheep, unlike other animals, will eat the entire plant, not just what is above ground, but also they'll pull the plant out and eat the root. And part of the. Biggest aspect of ranching is predicated on the fact that plants grow back fairly quickly. So there's a constant supply of food for the animals. Sheep mean that you have to wait a lot longer for plants to grow back because they eat the roots. This and a few other things. The fact that they would not become citizens and they would send back a lot of their money to the families in Spain or France. This gave rise to a stereotype of. Being selfish. The basks did not take that lightly. So in response, many of them ended up becoming citizens of the United States, and then they would purchase land to become established farmers alongside the ranching. The reputation of the Basque community then changed to become frugal, loyal, and honest. Now, uh, they're very well integrated into the community and they actually have. Uh, a, the National Basque Festival, it was originally based in Sparks, which is near Reno, and it was moved to Elco in the mid 1960s, and this helped because there were a lot more Basques and it was more centrally located between Western Nevada, Elco and Boise. There are a lot of Basques in southwestern Idaho, Eastern Nevada, and there are also several Basque restaurants in town. However, after looking at the menu of many of them, you do have to go at certain times. There's kind of a deli that does a more of a tapas kind of a thing. They have a different name for it, but I don't wanna, I'm not proficient in Bask so I'm not going to say it, but we can enjoy a very, I don't know, I just find it so unique it basks in Elco in this tiny little town in eastern Nevada. Elco is kind of frowned upon, and by a lot of people because it is. It's bleak. It's an outpost of civilization in once again, a very boring landscape, but it does mean that we are getting closer to Utah. So as we leave Elco, we are still passing Basin range, basin range, basin range. However, we are getting to Utah, which means that we're close to the ancient lake bed of Lake Bonneville. There's nowhere for the water to go but into the atmosphere through evaporation. So that means all of the mineral content remains. It doesn't get flushed out in part of the ocean. So you end up with a lot of these very salty valleys. And in this case, since we are arriving into Western Utah. There was such an amount of water that remained and then evaporated that you end up with Salt Flats, which are super famous for many, many reasons. So this is officially called the Great Salt Lake Desert, or the West Desert for us in Utah because it is west and it is a very distinctive part of the Great Basin Desert because it is literally just a salt flat. The Bonneville Salt Flats super famous if you're into land speed records, and you have probably seen a movie or two they have filmed there. But basically the Bonneville Salt Flats is a giant salt pan left over from Lake Bonneville, which is also the ancestor of the Great Salt Lake. It can be covered in kind of a finer film depending on where you are So it doesn't look as white. You do notice this from I 80, uh, where the freeway runs you will be able to tell certain places, but because of how they built it and the fact that they've overturned a lot of the earth, it is a little beige, but you can stop and pull off at the official. Bonneville, salt Flats visitor center and all that, salt pans are natural as opposed to salt evaporation ponds, which are very common across the planet, because that's one way to produce salt. Salt pans can also be extremely dangerous because in many cases there's a very, I guess it would look thick, but in relative terms, it's very thin and fragile. It's a. Thin crust of salt, and a lot of the times the earth underneath is actually wet to the point where it's mud and it's a very sticky mud. It's not just kind of like, kind of quick sandy, I guess, but without the sand and just more mud. Curiously, it's so big and it's so flat, and it's so white that it is useful for calibrating earth, observing satellites because it turns into a giant mirror, and so you can easily reflect signals back and forth. The salt flats out here in Bonneville, however, are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Or BLM, which to many people BLM will mean something totally and completely different. But out West I, I'll always hear Bureau of Land Management pretty much first, just because you always hear it in the news, BL M's, doing this with the land or people are suing BLM or BLM caught people poaching BLM, it manages many federal lands out here. So the salt flats of Bonneville are 12 miles long and five miles wide. And the salt, the, I guess the salt crust is what you'd really call it is five feet thick. At the center, it is a lot of salt. It holds 147 million tons, 90% of which is common table salt. I'm not suggesting that you go out there and scrape it up. Even though salt does kill germs just, ugh. Uh, a lot of people go out walking. You can drive on it when it is dry. We thought it was dry and we, we drove on it. Turned out it was wet. We really didn't know that until we got pulled over by A BLM car. On the way back to the freeway because it's kind of far off the freeway. It's, you can see it parallel, but the exit is far, and then you just drive along. We got pulled over and my dad was like, oh, why do you think he knows? And he's like, you've been driving on the salt flats? I mean, how do you tell it's white? It's not muddy. It doesn't look shiny. It's already white. You're already blinded by it. Anyways, we looked and got out and the wheel wells were coated in about an inch of this salty mud. Now, in our defense, we were not the only ones. We were probably the only ones who were picked up for it. I don't know. He promised us a ticket in the mail and it never came, and it became kind of the joke of the family driving on the salt flats. We have not been back since. Even though it is within a, it's a nice day trip, but also as we leave the salt flats to drive the rest of the way. Once you leave the salt flats, it is kind of a boring drive just because you, especially if you're driveless at night, you can see Salt Lake in the distance, and if there's clouds, you can see the lights really well reflected on it, and you just want to get home. That is all you want to do, get back to civilization. Another story is my mother and sister and I went to go out to Windover, which is the city right on the border. Of Nevada and Utah, you've gotta put a gambling outpost on the border of every state where the major road goes in. We were gonna go out to see the, the eclipse, because they were predicting better weather and there was just better visibility. In October, 2023, it was the, the night before was the day that the Aris Torah concert came out in theater. We went to see it before we drove out to Windover. It was great. We had a great time at the theater. We were like, oh, we're just gonna drive out to Windover. It'll be a super easy drive. It's about an hour and a half from the Wasatch front. We were looking at it and there was a big discrepancy between Apple Maps and Google Maps. I'm an Apple Maps person, by the way, but there was a huge discrepancy that it would say like four hours and we're like, oh, whatever. Apple's being tacky today. No. Turns out there was a major wreck and. When you drive this, there's only like two exits. So you either get off before the Salt Flats, there's this random exit and there's what they call the ranching exits. So there's one of those. So there's nothing to do. There's no roads. So you can get off there, or you have to drive all the way to the Salt flat exit, and then you're basically in Windover anyways. Well, somewhere in between two exits. There was a wreck and it was a terrible wreck because then it shut down the freeway. Any wreck that shuts down the freeway is really bad. However, when you're out in Windover, there's no exit. The emergency services did come from Twila. And then the tow truck has to come from Illa minimum. So we ended up sitting there. It was wild. You as we sat there, we got there at 10 30. We sat there until 2, 2 30. We have no idea what happened. We saw like they finally just pushed the cars off and then like they were getting all that. The ambulance sped back to Salt Lake. We don't know. We didn't see it, but. It. You would think that this would turn into a party. I mean, there's viral radio of people get stuck on freeways all the time and like, oh, everybody gets outta their cars. Kind of a la la land scene. No. Everybody was desperate. People started driving down the median to flip around or they would just drive through because it looks pretty, it looks like hard earth. No, this is where that idea of the salt being muddy comes back in. People would drive in and realize that it was about a foot deep some people who drove trucks or Jeeps or bigger SUVs were able to make it through and out and turn around and head back east to Salt Lake. However, some people realized that they were going to get stuck, and as we drove, we started to inch forward and pick up speed After they had cleaned up the accident. Uh, there were several stuck cars in the mud. They had tried to drive through the median and they got stuck in the salty mud. So moral of the story. Take lots of snacks of water because there's no exit and do not drive through the salty mud. It will end poorly for you will get a ticket, you'll get stuck. Just park in the parking lot, walk around. It's okay for your shoes to get muddy and then drive to Salt Lake, but we cannot leave the salt flats without also mentioning that it is very famous for, as a place as a venue. For breaking the land Speed record. The first time was in 1914 and that like ever since then for, that's now two, that's 100, sorry, I'm having a moment. 111 years of Speedy cars out on the salt flats. The record for a wheel driven vehicle is 449 miles an hour, and that's set in 2018. The record for a jet propelled vehicle is 630 miles an hour set in 1970. Basically, that is a car going faster than a modern airliner on the ground. Mind blowing. I'm just amazed. People can do it safely and actually get out of the car at the end. But who knew? Salt Flats perfect place to do that. So as we arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, coming from the West isn't as dramatic as coming through the mountains.'cause you come down on IED and go through Park City, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you pop out, come over, and then the valley stretches before you. In this case, you actually just get to see the mountains get closer and closer and closer until there's actually a skyline. Not just mountains, but first you go past, uh, Twila, which there is a really funny commercial'cause it's so true that they play all the time on Channel four news every night. It's an RV place, or, I don't know, just four wheelers that they say it's maybe three hours out, but it's only 30 minutes back. Which is so true. Technically, Illa is part of. The Salt Lake metro area, it might as not as well exist. It might as well not exist. I mean, we don't, no one goes out there unless you live there or you have family there. I should go exploring one day Anyways, as you pass Ula, there is another mountain range, pretty much the last one before the, the Wasatch Mountains called the Oker Mountains and at the far north end. Right where IED is going to go past, it is a massive smoke stack. It is officially called the Kennecott Garfield Smelter Stack. It is part of the whole Kennecott mining system that is the whole ochre mountain range.'cause if you've ever flown or just driven down I 15, you will see the copper mine. I mean, I could go out and stand on the mountain next to my house, which we're about 35 miles, and you'll see it plain as day. Especially in the morning when the sun is shining onto it directly instead of back from behind it. It's huge. It's massive. It is the largest open copper mine in the world. I'm always amazed that people live under it because I'd always be afraid of an earthquake jostling the. All that dirt that's in this huge mound and just coming down to the valley, that's just my irrational fear. Anyways, this smelter stack is part of that entire mining system. And curiously, I do love this. I love this smoke stack one because it looks really cool against the mountain. You can see it a lot when you're driving to Salt Lake from the north. It looks really cool because you're kind of like, oh, puny tower against this big mountain. It is actually 1,215 feet tall, which makes it the tallest, manmade structure west of the Mississippi River. Let's let that sit in for a second. Yes. The tallest, manmade structure is at the foot of a mountain in Utah. It surpasses all of the skyscrapers of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. All of them. No, nothing's, nothing's taller. And no one really knows that because it just looks teeny in comparison next to the mountain. It's by, just to give you a quick comparison, the tallest building west of the Mississippi is the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles, and it tops out at 1,100 feet. So go us 115 feet of major difference. But you would never know it. This tower is also kind of a joke in our family because the Salt Lake Valley and, well, the whole Wasatch front is fairly green. There's lots of trees that's that have been planted. There's lots of people. It just looks very civilized. That tower.'cause you can't see round Twila from the mountain, but you see the, the tower and then the freeway and then all the mountain ranges going out into the Great Basin again. And so it kind of reminds us of Mor door in Lord of the Rings as kind of the guard tower and then out into the bleak desolation. That is kind of beautiful, by the way, so it doesn't look tall because the mountain it sits under is 9,000 feet tall and it is used to disperse. Exhaust gases from the Utah, the Kennecott, Utah hopper smelter. So workers can actually take a small elevator and ladder to the top and there's filters up there and sensors and all sort of stuff that probably the EPAs mandated, but there's a ton of stuff up there. And you can actually go up to the top and they do have a picture of what like inside it. Fascinating. However. It's just not a well, like we all see it, but we don't know that. We don't, it's not a big thing that we say that it's the tallest, manmade structure west of the Mississippi. Maybe we could put it on a license plate. I don't know. But we're arriving to the end of our day here because we're gonna stop in Salt Lake. It's the perfect place to stop. Now we're driving past the, the lake. This is actually the closest time we get to the lake, even though it's called Salt Lake. It doesn't sit on the lake. It sits, I don't know what, five miles from it. The airport is right on the lake. Uh, but as soon as you get past the airport, it's just welcome to Civilization, suburbs, city. So if you want to know more about the Salt Lake, I did an episode on it in the previous season. Lots of quirky stories here. Flamingos possible whales and, um. Grave robbers. Yes, stranded grave robbers on islands that then escape. It's a whole, it's a whole thing. But that is in the previous season. So our last thing we're going to talk about today is the state capital. I think every state fills a point of pride for their capitol building. They're, a lot of'em are very unique. They're very reflective of the state's character. They're many times built. With the resources from the state. However, I will say this, and once again, I'm gonna get on my little Utah soapbox. I think that it's Utah's is really beautiful in particular because it sits on a hill above the city, so you can see it all the time, and you can see it at the end of State Street if you drive up the valley. But a lot of other places, their capitals are obviously just sitting on flat ground, and so you have to kind of find, it can be hard to find a good viewpoint of the whole building itself, and it just disappears, especially if it's in a built up part of the capital city that it's then dwarfed by everything else. Not in Utah? Nope, nope, nope. Sits on a hill. It's really pretty. So Utah is unique because all of our neighbors were granted statehood way before us except for Arizona. I'll give them that. However, like Nevada Battle born, it was granted statehood in the civ during the Civil War, 1860s, Utah had to wait until 1896. Now many of you're probably guessing why it did, so. In 1888, utah tried to get statehood. It's a whole deal. Utah as a state, as a territory, and the federal government did not get along for most of the 18 hundreds, obviously, because Utah was basically a theocracy where the leaders of the church, of Jesus Christ, of Latter-Day Saints basically ruled the territory. Of the state and there were some policies, practices, what have you, that the feds did not like. They did march out here once and uh, all of the settlers here in Salt Lake actually buried the foundation of the Salt Lake temple. They call it the Utah War. I don't think it really, I'd have to go look, but. I don't think anybody really had casualties. It just was kind of a show, but they arrived in an empty city. I think that is in the movie. Brigham Young, from the forties, watched that in school, was part of Utah history. Anyways, long story short, it took them basically 50 years, 49 years from 1847 when the pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley until 1896 to become a state. So in 1888, way before their plan of the long game here, a commission was created and then they selected the architect of the Michigan, Texas, and Colorado State capitals to build Utah's for whenever the moment came. However, when the architect came to them with the plan, they rejected it'cause it was$1 million,$1 million. And 1888 would be roughly 31 million. As of modern times, probably a bit more now with inflation, because I looked this up in the beginning of the year, however, statehood comes around in 1896. It's a big day January 4th. We actually don't celebrate it or care because July 24th is much more fun and it's in the summer. They did not have a capital building, even 13 years later in 1909. So they came up with a new commission and they selected this hill. That overlooks. Salt Lake. It's now called Capitol Hill. I don't know what it's called before, but because of its location immediately to the north of downtown. And also it has a really great view of the valley and the mountains on all sides. Many homes were, uh, destroyed and people were forced to move, and these homes were owned by some of Utah's most influential citizens. I don't know what it is about Utah, and maybe it is. Many other places in the US, but hills, living on the hillside is a status symbol. I don't know. I always see wildfires, especially in Utah, we see them all like, knock on wood, we have not had one along the Wasatch front for a very long time. But all the time, every time there's even a small fire, the house is on the hill are the first ones to be evacuated anyways, so the influential citizens were very upset. The state said, don't care. We like the hill. Then the state hired the Olmsted Brothers of Central Park Fame to create this elaborate, elaborate ground kind of a park. It is very beautiful. The architect was Richard Ka Cladding and Young and sons, and in preparation. Richard Cladding visited several state capitals with Kentucky's being a notable influence, which if you look at a picture, you can kind of see it. And a lot of people will say, oh, all state capitals look the same.'cause they're all based on the US Capitol. Mm. Yes. Ours though does have a dark dome. It's very beautiful. This I, it looks like slate. I don't know what it is. It's very beautiful and you can look at Kentucky and see various, uh, various similarities. It was finished in 1916, and here's an interesting fact, just that I mentioned that state capitals were very reflective of state characters and their culture and their history. However, if you walk into the Utah State Capitol, rotunda, which is where my high school's prom was, makes no sense, but that's where it was. If you walk into that rotunda and look up at the chandelier, very beautiful, very great, and you'll be like, okay, chandelier. But then if you drive to Arkansas and you go into their rotunda, you will notice that the chandeliers are the exact same, which is very interesting. So there must have been some sort of capital building club, architects, suppliers, et cetera. The Capitol building was completely renovated in the mid two thousands to be earthquake proof. Once again, uh, if you do have a sharp eye and nowhere to look, you can tell where the fault line runs along the benches above the Wasatch front. Kind of freaky. And another claim to fame for the Utah State Capitol besides being home to my high school's prom, of course, is that it was used as the US Capitol in the film Legally Blonde too, which sadly I, I've never watched that because I am not the biggest fan of sequels all the time, especially when the first one is just that great. Don't ruin the story. But yes, that is the Utah State Capitol. And it sits on a hill. And now we're gonna go find a hotel and get ready because now it is Mountain Day for a small bit. And then also the worst drive. I kid you not everything bad anybody else says about any other drive in the United States. Thank you again for following along this day, and I hope that you will no longer call the great base in ugly. We'll just look off to the West as we go to bed in Salt Lake and enjoy a beautiful sunset. Thanks for joining us and see you next time on The Nifty, nifty 50 Show.