Salt Lake to Cheyenne

Now comes the worst possible drive ever: Wyoming. (Sorry not sorry.) But before we leave SLC, we'll talk about the Olympics and pioneers, then endure Evanston and the barrenness of central-southern Wyoming where it snows in June and there's a random Lincoln statue in the mountains.

Transcript

0:09

Hello everybody and welcome to the next stage of our transcontinental journey. We're in Salt Lake City. We arrived after passing through the desert and a center for Basque culture in the United States. But before we get going, we're gonna enjoy some more time in Salt Lake City because honestly, honestly. This next day is, this next part is the hardest part of any trip leaving Utah and going east for me, unless you are lucky enough to go down through price and then basically down Green River and then hitch your wagon to I 70 and go into Colorado,'cause Wyoming. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I'll explain it more'cause we're gonna start in Salt Lake. So everyone knows that Salt Lake is home to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, colloquially known as Mormons. Even though the church is trying to change the narrative and not be called Mormons, but for the sake of clarity because everybody else knows them as Mormons. We're just gonna say it in this. So we're gonna go to, this is the place we ended at the state capitol. And if we just tole along the bench a little to the east, close to the University of Utah, we end up at, this is the place. So there are many, many cities that one cannot find the beginning and. This is mentioned in a book about Oklahoma City that is really, really good. And I've mentioned this in a previous season when talking about the, uh, sonic boom tests over Oklahoma City. And the author said, we say Rome wasn't built in a day. And he said, and that's because no one really can point to a single moment when a city. Really just spring to life. And he said in some cases you can. Oklahoma City just exploded. He calls it pop. He compares it to popcorn. Salt Lake is very similar in that way. We can point to a single date when they planted the flag in the ground and said this is the place. So what happened was that Mormon pioneers were traveling west, and this is because they. We're having neighborly disputes to put it lightly in the Midwest. They had initially gone to Missouri after being in Ohio, northeast Ohio, and then they fled to Navu, Illinois, which sits on the Mississippi River just across from Iowa. Things did not go well there in the end either, and there was a whole succession crisis and all of this stuff. The leader, Joe Smith, was brutally murdered in jail. And a majority of the members of the fledgling church came west with Brigham Young, at the head of the Pioneer Train. I guess now, if we remember talking about this, it takes months to travel across the country. Obviously, because you're walking, you can travel next to a river. In often cases it's the pla, which we will talk more about when we get into Nebraska. But the PLA will peter out. It splits into two parts and you either go to Denver or you go into the highlands of Wyoming. You cannot cross by reverse. You will have to obviously cross by foot. Makes it a very hard journey. So it took months and months of travel and the wagon train left probably early spring, mid-spring, and after about three months they arrived in the. Western part of the Rocky Mountains, which we call the Wasatch. And Brigham Young was sick with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, but they came up to a kind of an outlook over the what is now Salt Lake Valley. And he proclaimed it is enough. This is the right place, drive on. And so Salt Lake was founded, nestled in. With a mountain range, a ti, like a half mountain range to the north. And then along the eastern side there was the Wasatch Mountains. And so we don't say this is the right place anymore, it's just this is the place. And you can go to the monument where they came out of Immigration Canyon and I, this is just me, maybe there's a bunch of other people who think this, but because Interstate 80. Goes up through Parleys Canyon. I always envisioned them coming out of Parleys Canyon, but that was not the case. Even though Parleys is better suited for highways. They came out of Immigration Canyon. And it wasn't until 1947 that a monument was placed to honor the pioneers. And why 1947? That's because it's 100 years and as I said, there is a single date we can point to and it's July 24th, 1847 that is now commemorated in Utah as Pioneer Day. I love it. We get the day off, obviously,'cause it's a state holiday and people always call and they're like, I tried calling the office yesterday. Or you didn't answer your email. Yeah. State holiday people, and to the best of my knowledge, it is actually really difficult to find another state with a similar kind of holiday where it is kind of a celebration of statehood.'cause obviously statehood is in January, January 4th, but we could care less Utah. July 24th, pioneer Day, and it could not be better to celebrate Pioneer Day when it is 95 plus degrees and we're all hiding out in air conditioning and thinking of the poor pioneers who had to come here and build everything from the ground up with no air conditioning. So we just find it highly ironic every year that it's really hot and. Brother Brigham said this is the right place. And you know those people behind him. The other pioneers were probably thinking, you know, Oregon, the Willamette Valley, California, they're just a bit farther beyond, and those were known as really great farming places. So a lot of these people were from England, the Midwest, the northeast places with decent farming conditions. Utah does not fall into. That category, but this is the right place. So that is how Salt Lake came to be. It is now not as religious as many people think. In fact, it's just, there's lots of stereotypes that we could unpack about Salt Lake. But we're gonna move on and talk about the Winter Olympics because Salt Lake is now the host city for 2034, and it is not the first time. The first time was in 2002, and it was from February 8th to the 24th, and it was the eighth Olympics hosted in the United States, and they still have some claim to fame because they're the most recent to be held in the United States, which will be the case until 2028 when the Summer Olympics are held in Los Angeles. They were the first Olympics where a single committee organized both the Olympics and Paralympics, which set a new standard in the organization of both. About 2,400 athletes. Yes, it's really 2,399. Athletes from 78 nations came from all over the world to compete. Germany topped the medal table at 36 medals the United States was second with 34, and Norway was the country with the most gold medals at 25, and Australia was the first southern hemisphere country to win a gold at the Winter Olympics. So. Those are some neat statistics and which probably a bigger reason why Utah's excited to host them again. The Olympics ended with a budgetary surplus of$40 million, which is unheard of most Olympics. You never get any return on the investment. You only really get the. Branding out of it because having to put all that money into making new stadiums, new venues, upgrading the city itself just to get around the transportation, it's nuts and it's expensive. And so to, for a city to host the Olympics and end with a surplus is quite spectacular. It led to the creation of the Utah Athletic Foundation, which was a key part in the successful bid for the future Olympics in about nine years. However, it wasn't all great. It was rocked with a bribery scandal in 1998. Where nothing technically illegal happened. It just looked really, really poor. Several IOC members had to be removed and new bylaws instituted, and it turns out what happened. Officials had accepted gifts that were excessive, and it wasn't the first time. This had also happened for the 1998 Winter Olympics in nano Japan and the 2000 summer Olympics in Sydney. But this one was highly, highly visible and we, it still gets talked about every so often. You'll hear on the news with some, I don't know, we heard it like when they announced the New Olympics, it got hashed out all over again. Interesting. But it's all in the past, I guess. The mascots, of course, the cutest part of the Olympics were powder, copper and coal, and they were a snowshoe hair, a coyote, and a bear, respectively. I remember it was in first grade and we went up to Logan to see the torch. That was cool. There was a lot that you just, I don't know when you're that, when you're that young and a lot gets forgotten, but it was just a big deal. People still have Olympic license plates. We went down to get the berets from Roots. Still have that on my shelf and we did go to a few trading pin places. Which was just also really interesting as a small kid, just to see a whole room full of people from all over the world, trading pins and buying pins, and you'd put'em all over the hat. It was a great time and we are very proud of it. And if ever seen a Utah license plate, you know that we claim to have the greatest snow on earth. Let that sink in. I know everybody's always like, oh, Colorado has the best ski resorts where people are like, well, isn't France or Switzerland better? And then people out east are like, well, we get way more snow than Utah does. Yeah. But the Salt Lake actually helps create this very powdery snow that's very light and fluffy and it's renowned worldwide. So. Lots of people have that to look forward to for the 2034 Winter Olympics. So let us get in our car and head East. Oddly, it gets really boring, really fast and as AAN who's lived here for 30 years, pretty much, it is kind of a sad drive now because you come out out of Salt Lake Valley, which is really great if you're going the opposite way.'cause all of a sudden you come outta the mountain and boom. Uh, 1.2 million people in the valley, but you go up and Park City used to be really fun to go to, and I'm sure that lots of people are gonna hear that and say, well, it still is. Uh, I beg to differ. Why? Because now that backside of Salt Lake Summit County is basically condo central. It's insane to drive up there. We go up there maybe once or twice a year, and every time it looks like they've just added a whole new city up there. It's kind of sad and I get, I'm glad to have people come and enjoy Utah, but it is absolutely bonkers. The construction that is going on and Park City, you can't really even find parking. We don't go to Park City a lot anymore. Uh, we used to go to the outlets all the time, but. Yeah. Midway, however, midway and Hebrew fun, Swiss days, fun times. Anyways, so let's continue. We'll go past some reservoirs, which are super necessary because obviously it doesn't rain for most of the summer or fall, and we are going to sadly enter the worst state in the country. Now I get everybody's going to say, oh, Wyoming Wyoming's. So pretty. Wyoming has Yellowstone, Wyoming has the Tetons. Wyoming has Devil's Tower. Yes. Yes it does. But that is such a minuscule part of the state. Why? But of course, small but beautiful means it's going to outstrip everything else because the drive from Evanston really more rock springs. But rock springs to Laramie is the absolute worst. It is ugly. And I love a barren landscape. We talked about it in Great Basin, but it is just bleak, and sure there's fun. There's fun places like Little America where you can stop and get ice cream and they have a really cool store and it's just this oasis in the middle of bleak nothingness. But once again, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons cannot do anything to. Get rid of Interstate 80 in Wyoming. It, it is terrible. And I know a lot of people say, well, Nebraska's terrible too. Nope. There's more cities, there's more greenery. There's a river. It's also Nebraska, which makes it a thousand times better. Sorry. Nebraska is in my top five states in the country. But Wyoming, ugh. Although it was fun as a child to go to Evanston, I mean, that's kind of a rite of passage for Salt Lake Suburbanites to go to Evanston to buy fireworks when aerial fireworks were more or less illegal in suburban Salt Lake. And then it just became not fun anyways, because everybody else went up there and there were a lot of cops. I mean, it was kind of like the neighborhood would trade stories about. Getting pulled over or not getting pulled over or having to go the most roundabout ways. And we've heard people would go up through Idaho or they'd go around the utas and there's some really pretty roads, but also really roads, you just don't want to drive on a whim. Yep. So Evanston also evanston's notorious, uh, at my. Work because I do work with public housing, and one day the boss got an email and he was intrigued because he knew people involved in the email, not they were adjacent. They were the auditors. But what happened, and this is all public because it came out in an email blast from the federal government to people who were signed up for this newsletter that Evanston, which we kind of think of as just this boring place. The first place you enter into, there's not much there. This place, was rocked by Scandal because they committed fraud. How did they commit fraud? You ask. Well, the executive director or one of the uppity ups was using public money to buy pavers for his private residence. Now the maintenance man was looking at all the receipts. Obviously he's seeing all these orders for stuff he didn't order when he clearly is the main person ordering something like that, and he ordered. Security cameras because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. So now the uppity up realizes this, and instead of saying, Hey, you know what, we're both committing fraud became a mutual blackmail scheme because he couldn't turn one, the, the two men couldn't turn each other in without implicating themselves in their own schemes. Right? So, of course it blows wide open. They obviously get fired. Prosecuted all of this stuff. Uh, the pavers were set in. The, the maintenance man landscaper came and put the pavers in as kind of a hush payment to keep quiet. And yes, if you were wondering if the girlfriend was cheating, she was, the cameras caught it all, Evanston, Wyoming, that, that's the most exciting part right. So let's get out of town. We'll pass little America. Little America has a really interesting story because it literally is in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden you'll be driving and then there will be. This hotel, compound gas station with a bunch of trees and trees are not very common. This high up in elevation. And it's just an interesting place to come across. And it has the wildest story because the founder, his name is Steven Covey, which if you're in tune with Utah, is a very famous family name. He was. A sheep herder in the 1890s, and he was alone in this, like I said, bleak part of Wyoming, and he became lost in a blizzard. And he had to stay out all night. He essentially kind of got a little lost and he said, quote that long January night in that terrible storm with a 50 mile wind and the temperature about 40 below passed very, very slowly. And oh, how I longed for a warm fireside, something to eat, and wool blankets. I thought what a blessing it would be if some good soul would build a house of shelter of some kind on that God first vacant spot. End quote. And that is exactly what he did. He was inspired by Admiral Bird who had created a little America camp in the, in Antarctica. And so he named his business Little America, and it has been an oasis for many a traveler ever since then. And they're, they're really famous for their ice cream cones'cause they're very cheap. And ice cream is very delicious, but wild. And so he at least saw potential in Wyoming. I just pressed the gas pedal a little harder. Better to get through it because honestly you will get up into one of the bleakest places and I'm probably beating a dead horse with that word. But let us get to why. So Wyoming is really famous because it is extremely high in elevation, beautiful mountains, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah. 80 does not pass through scenes of mountain majesty like it would in Colorado on I 70, but you do cross over the continental divide twice, which is intriguing. So what is a continental divide? That is a drainage divide on a continent such the drainage basin on one side feeds into one ocean or sea, and the basin on another feeds into a different ocean or sea, or is end or aic. So we've already talked about the Great Basin where all the water just runs down into the valley and evaporates. But the continent of the divide in Wyoming essentially does divide it there. One side will go to the Pacific, the other side will go to the Atlantic, or even the Gulf of Mexico. So basically the Atlantic, but Gulf of Mexico, it's really kind of mind blowing to think that, that you could pour a water bottle out and then an hour later pour another one and they will end up on opposite sides of the planet. But that's how it works. But Wyoming is peculiar because the continental divide actually splits in two, and so you will traverse a valley that just, it looks like you're on another planet. It's just so dry. There's no trees, there's nothing. Just mountains and a prison town. I wouldn't know. Maybe not. Anyways, this bleak town. Maybe a gas station maybe, but it's intriguing because now you're in, essentially in a hole in the middle of the continental divide. Anyways, that's exciting. There are six continental divides in North America. The Great divide, which is what? Most people think of us, the continental divide. It runs from the bearing sea all the way down through the Andes and into South America, and that's the main one, right? Pacific Atlantic. There's also the Laurentian, which runs from the Rocky Mountains in far North Montana to the Labrador Sea, and this is where water will drain into Hudson Bay. So basically the prairie provinces, they're in this divide and there's one point. Where it's called the Triple Divide, and it's known as the hydrological apex of North America because it's where three divides meet. So Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean, all from one mountaintop, which is interesting. Then there's the Arctic divide, which is mostly. Way up north, way, way, way up north. Anything that drains into the Arctic Ocean. Then the St. Lawrence divide, which is anything that drains into the Great Lakes essentially, or the St. Lawrence River. And then the Eastern Divide, which runs along the Appalachian Mountains, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico. And then of course, the Great Basin, which we already talked about. No water runs out of it. It just goes up into the sky via. Evaporation. So this great divide is exceptional for its height. The highest point is in Colorado, and it's 14,278 feet on Gray's Peak. There is a trail that runs the length of it through the United States. However, it's probably not as, Hmm, it's probably not as useful. No. It is probably not as benign as, say, the Appalachian Trail, which isn't benign in any sense of the word, but it probably small potatoes compared to the Great Divide Trail. And the lowest point of the trail is in New Mexico at 4,200 feet. So that's, that's the lowest point of the trail, and it's pretty much through Canada, the United States, this basin that I'm talking about is called the Great Divide Basin. Um, it's essentially a mini great basin. It's at 6,500 feet above sea level on average. There's one town, as I mentioned, wams that are depressing, and it was a huge obstacle to those going west because there's no real water. You're climbing up an extremely high ridge on one side, and then you have to do it all over again and then go down on the other. As I mentioned, it's one of the most depressing places in the United States. So let's press the gas pedal and skedaddle. Wyoming does get prettier now that you're dropping down into the great plains of the Midwest and Laramie. Laramie is forever a place our hearts more or less belong to in a small way, because it's a whole story. But in 2020 when COVID hit and the whole country shut down, my sister. Came home from spring break. She was out east in Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts for school, and they told them, Hey, go on spring break, like normal. We think this will blow over. Maybe you get an extra week of spring break. Ha ha ha. So she came home with a suitcase full of just one week worth of clothing. All of her stuff got stranded, her car got stranded, and so we couldn't go fetch it for a while, obviously, because everything was closed. So we ended up renting a car, driving across the country in June when things relaxed a bit for the first time. And we stayed in her apartment for like a day and she hurried and packed some stuff because they were like, well, we don't know if school will be in person in the fall, blah, blah, blah. It was, and then we had to drive back across the country. Now my sister had a Ford Escape and it was a great car. It was a great car until 2020. She had had problems with it before, but what ended up happening is that the air conditioner didn't work. Now, if you have ever been basically east of the Rocky Mountains in early June, you know that you were at the start of hot and humid season, basically summer, but it's not like summer in the West'cause we're not humid driving through that. With no air conditioning in the car is really fun. Not it was okay. Leaving Massachusetts in Connecticut. We went through, um, the southern tier of New York, so passing through Binghamton, also depressing Corning, and a very depressing place called Olean. Another story for another interstate and. Then as soon as we hit Ohio, because we drove from Massachusetts to Medina, Ohio, just south of Cleveland, and it was like a wall of heat and humidity. This was also the time I was about to move out to Ohio, so we swung down to Cincinnati to see my school and my future apartment and all that, and it was so hot, so hot. And my sister has really bad allergies, so all the pollen, the air, because there's no filter, and we had to keep the windows down, made her eyes swell shut. So it was just, it was really fun all around for her. And we ended up driving from Medina through Cincinnati to, uh, Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue. And my dad was like, where you, you didn't drive, you stayed in two states. And we were like, well, yeah, we went to Cincinnati. Um. And then the next day, I think we drove from Lafayette to like Davenport once again, that's not very far. And my dad was like, once again, what are you doing? And we basically were suffering. Uh, if you've ever driven with the car down at about 75, anything over 70 miles an hour with heat and humidity, it's really loud. To the point where your hair follicles hurt on your head because the wind whipping through the car. And we, we took it really slowly. But now remember, this is June. This is early June, and we made it to Nebraska and it was really oppressive. It was about 95 degrees as we were going through central Nebraska. Well, we decided to stay in Laramie'cause we couldn't take a day of it. And then we were looking ahead at the weather and turns out Laramie had a blizzard warning. So as we climbed up out of Nebraska and all of a sudden the temperature dropped in an hour, it probably dropped about 45, 50 degrees. Get through Cheyenne. Start climbing up out of Cheyenne to go through the past in Laramie, and it's snowing like thick, heavy, wet flakes. The heater worked in the car. And so we were, we were giddy. We were giddy, and we arrived in Laramie and we were happy and we ate at chilies, and it was the best chilies probably because we were just so thrilled that we were in 35 degree weather with snow in the middle of June. And I have a really great picture of a store in Laramie that said, welcome summer, and it's snowing. It's iconic. That's Wyoming for you though. Winter. Winter hangs on for a very long time. So remember the pioneers, but that's why we love Laramie. The chilies was really great and all of a sudden it wasn't. So that was depressing. But as we drive out of Laramie and towards Cheyenne, we're gonna pass one of the most random things I've seen on the roadside in the United States, which is kind of a big deal because there's a lot of random things on the roadside in the United States, and this is a Lincoln statue. It's just this massive bust. Of Abraham Lincoln. It's called the Lincoln Monument officially, and it's a bust that is 12 and a half feet tall that sits on a pedestal 30 feet tall out in the middle of the mountains. It's wild. It's really fascinating to see. We stopped over once. To enjoy the snow. And this idea comes from the Wyoming Parks Commission who wanted to celebrate Lincoln's 150th birthday. So this is the mid 1950s, and their logic was that Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which spurred the Transcontinental Railroad. That ran through Wyoming that we've already talked about in California, and so one Wyoming landowner funded the entire project. They chose a sculptor also from Wyoming named Robert Russon. Initially it was built by US Highway 30, which as the interstate system was being built, would be subsumed into Interstate 80, and it was moved to its current position in 1969. The statue itself was actually constructed, sculpted, you could say, in Mexico City because the sculptor said it had a very stable climate, perfect for sculpting metal. When it was moved through Laramie, the initial time they had to cut the telephone and electric, uh, they had to cut the telephone and electricity cables to allow the statue to pass a lot of sacrifice for that day. I'm sure they hooked it right back up. And then they carted it up into the mountains, stuck it on a pedestal and left it there for many a driver to enjoy or wonder why is there this ginormous bust of Abraham Lincoln in the middle of Wyoming? And there you go. That's why Wyoming wanted to celebrate his hundred 50th birthday. They chose a bunch of Wyoming people to pitch in and it's still there today. And now we've arrived in Cheyenne. Mm, Cheyenne Dear Cheyenne, it should be the outpost of Midwest Civilization, but I've given that to Kearney, Nebraska, but that's for another day. Kind of a short one, but like I said, it's not much to look out. Hopefully you have a good book. You fall asleep, or we've had some great tunes on because Wyoming, that's all I'll say about Wyoming now'cause we are leaving and we're in Cheyenne. And tomorrow we get to Nebraska. Anyways, thank you for joining on this trip this far and can't believe it, but we're almost in the center of the country and so join me next time as we travel through Nebraska. Scam.