Living Our Dream

Salt Lake City, UT, Part III: Emigration Canyon

 After we left the Bingham Canyon Mine, we drove about an hour over the the eastern side of Salt Lake City to Emigration Canyon. As we mentioned in our last post, Emigration Canyon was the place where Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers entered Salt Lake Valley.

We had two reasons for going to Emigration Canyon. First, it is the location of This is the Place Heritage Park, which commemorates early pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. Second, it is the home of Ruth's Diner which was featured on the Food Network program Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. It took us longer to get to Emigration Canyon than we thought, and it was after 1:00 PM. We were very hungry, so we went to Ruth's first. The photo below shows the outside of Ruth's Diner.

Ruth was born in 1895. As a young woman, she performed in some of the bars around Salt Lake City as a singer.

In 1930, she opened Ruth's Hamburgers in the downtown area. After the building where she rented space for her hamburger shop was sold and demolished, Ruth bought an old Salt Lake City trolley car, moved it up to Emigration Canyon, and reopened her restaurant in 1949. The original trolley car is still part of the restaurant. It is the windowed section behind the center umbrella in the photo above.

Ruth was very independent, and she built an apartment off the back of the diner where she lived alone with her Chihuahua dogs for almost 40 years. The photo below shows Ruth with one of her dogs. You can tell she was a no-nonsense woman. Her dogs were reportedly pretty feisty, too.

Ruth's became a favorite stop in the 1950s and 60s for frat boys from the University of Utah looking for a cold beer and local color. Ruth didn't care much for regulations and didn't bother to check IDs.

Ruth sold the diner to one of those frat boys back in 1977, and she lived out her days in a duplex behind the diner. The diner was sold to its current owners, Tracy and Erik Nelson, in 2001.

Renovations to the diner have just been completed, and although the inside is very nice, we chose to eat out back on the patio. If you check the menu under the Ruth's Diner link above you will see there have been some upgrades over the years, not only to the diner itself, but also to the menu. Margery had a Caprese sandwich, which is fresh mozzarella cheese, caramelized balsamic red onions, roasted tomatoes, fresh basil, and pesto mayonnaise on toasted pesto focaccia. Paul had a pulled pork barbecue sandwich. The pork was very smoky, and the sauce was thick and sweet. Yum!

 

Ruth's "Mile High" biscuits are also served with the sandwiches. They are truly the tallest biscuits we have ever seen. They are also so rich they almost don't need butter. We had them with homemade strawberry jam.

Normally, we wouldn't have had dessert after such a big lunch, but Ruth's is famous for chocolate pudding. This isn't your mama's pudding out of a box. It's made from scratch and it's rich, smooth and chocolaty.

With our bellies full, we drove a short distance down the canyon to This is the Place Heritage Park. As the story goes, Brigham Young was very ill with a case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and was riding in the back of a wagon. After coming down the canyon, Brigham Young proclaimed, "This is the place" after seeing Salt Lake Valley.

The LDS Church was founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1830 in western New York. In 1931, Smith moved the church to Ohio, then to Missouri, and later to Illinois. When Joseph Smith was arrested and subsequently killed by a mob in 1844, Brigham Young assumed control of the LDS Church. When conflicts between Illinois residents and LDS followers continued, Brigham Young led his followers to Utah in 1847.

In 1947, on the 100th anniversary of Brigham Young's entry into the valley, This is the Place Monument was dedicated. Although the monument was created primarily to commemorate the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers, other pioneers and explorers such as Benjamin Bonneville (U. S. Army officer, trapper), Jim Bridger (mountain man, trapper), John Fremont (U. S. Army officer, explorer), Silvestre Vélez de Escalante (18th century Franciscan missionary and Spanish explorer) are also honored. 

A group of private citizens bought the land surrounding the monument and donated it to the state. In 1959, a visitor center was built near the monument. Popularity of the monument led the state to begin planning a more elaborate living history museum in 1971. The state purchased additional land and began moving, restoring and reconstructing historic pioneer buildings on the site.

The first building moved to the park in 1971 and restored was Brigham Young's Forest Farmhouse. The house, which was originally located in the southern part of Salt Lake City, was not used as a residence, but was used to entertain visiting dignitaries and guests. The farm also served as a research facility to experiment with various crops.

There are now 30 or 40 historic structures in the park that have been relocated or reconstructed. These include log cabins, frame homes, adobe homes, shops, meeting halls, and stores. The photo below shows two of the log cabins.

The cabins were typically one room - cooking and living on one side, and sleeping on the other - with a sleeping loft above for the kids. The next photo shows the bedroom side of one of the cabins.

One of the more elaborate homes was the reproduction of the Heber C. Kimball house. The original house was located on a 10-acre lot at the edge of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Heber C. Kimball was one of the early leaders of the LDS Church. The house needed to be large because some sources say Heber had over 39 wives.

The house in the photo below is the Fairbanks house, which was relocated from Payson, UT. Payson is located south of Salt Lake City, and Brigham Young used to stay with Fairbanks when he was on his way to visit some of the southern Mormon communities. The house is fairly large, and the Fairbanks were most likely an upper middle class family.

We walked most of the main streets and looked into a number of the buildings, but it was getting late. We were getting tired, so we called it a day and headed back to the car. On our way out of the park, we stopped at another monument to the Pony Express. Salt Lake City was a major city on the Pony express route.

The Pony Express was founded in April, 1860, as a means of delivering mail rapidly from St. Joseph, MO, to Sacramento, CA. By changing tired horses for fresh ones at stations placed about 10 miles apart along the 2,000-mile route, riders could cover 75 to 100 miles a day. After traveling that distance at a full gallop, the riders would also stop to rest. When one rider stopped, another would take over so the mail could travel both day and night. Mail could be delivered from the East Coast to the West coast in about 10 days using the Pony Express. The Pony Express only operated for about 18 months until October, 1861, when the telegraph made it obsolete.

Back at the motor home we began planning our next sightseeing adventure. There's lots more to see around salt Lake City, so stay tuned.

Provo, UT

For our next stop we had about a four-hour drive where we cut across the mountains from Panguitch to I-15, then headed north to Provo, UT. We stayed at Utah Lake State Park, which like most state parks, has widely-spaced sites. The roads and pads are paved, and the sites are grass. There are 30-amp electric and water hookups, but no sewer.

Most of the sites are back-ins, but there are a few pull-throughs that are parallel to the road like the ones on the left in the photo below.

Although you can't see the lake from the campground, there are nice views of the snow-capped Wasatch Range to the east.

The campground was fairly quiet. There was no traffic noise, and only a few very distant trains that you could barely hear. Even on the busy July 4th weekend the campground wasn't that noisy. The campground wasn't full, but we ended up across from a very large group that took up two sites. On their two sites there were 6 vehicles, 2 boats, 4 tents, and at one point there were at least 20 people. Even so, they weren't that noisy. There were no loud radios, no barking dogs and no late-night parties around the campfire. Of course, it helped that it was hot and we ran the air conditioner during the day.

We scheduled a 5-day stop at Utah Lake State Park without any real plans for sightseeing. It just seemed like a good place to sit out the busy holiday weekend and relax.

We started off our stay on our first full day there with a late lunch at Burgers Supreme. In addition to numerous varieties of burgers, Burgers Supreme has a fairly complete sandwich menu that includes several types of chicken, gyros, hot dogs, steak, BLT, and more.

We were both in the mood for a good burger, so Paul had a green-chili cheeseburger, and Margery had a blue-cheese bacon burger. Both were yummy, as were the sides of onion rings and fries. Below, Margery is dipping into 'fry sauce' which is unique to Utah. Invented over 45 years ago, it is offered in nearly every eatery in the state.

 

During our stay, Paul worked on a couple of minor projects like making a door to cover the new opening he had to cut in the closet wall to work on the washer/dryer and installing a second support strut on one of our outside storage bay doors. The door originally came with only one strut, and the door was just heavy enough that it would sometimes blow closed in windy weather. Since we could find nothing in the rules about not washing vehicles, Paul gave both the car and the motor home much needed baths. We also made a Walmart run to restock our groceries.

On one of our days at Utah Lake State Park we decided to walk over and take a look at the lake. At an area of over 150 square miles, Utah Lake is the second largest natural freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. Lake Tahoe is the largest in the west at 191 square miles. The Utah Lake has only one outlet - the Jordan River that flows into the Great Salt Lake. Although Utah Lake is considered a freshwater lake, the water is slightly salty. The outflow from the lake is restricted, and therefore much water is lost to evaporation resulting in the slight salinity.

The lake was a very popular boating destination, especially since it was a holiday weekend. The parking lot was filled with trucks and boat trailers, and many more were using the numerous boat launches.

Although there were a few jet skis, most of the boats were larger inboard/outboards with families on board. Sometimes there were even several generations with an older couple, a younger couple, and numerous kids.

There is a large harbor/launch area protected by a breakwater. We walked all the way to the end of the breakwater to watch a steady line of boats heading out into and back from the lake. It was windy, and the lake itself was fairly choppy, but that didn't seem to deter the boaters. There was plenty of wake-boarding and tubing going on.

We had a nice, relaxing stay at Utah Lake State Park. With the 4th of July on Sunday, most people had Monday off. Normally, we would have stayed until Tuesday and watched everyone else leave. However, our next stop was north of Salt Lake City at a new, relatively expensive campground. We decided we could economize, at least a little, by getting a weekly rate. Because of some of our future reservations, getting a weekly rate in North Salt Lake City meant we would have to leave Utah Lake on Sunday.

It was a short drive of only about an hour to our next stop, so we took our time in the morning. Unfortunately, when we tried to dump on our way out of the campground, we discovered the dump station was plugged up. There was a Flying J nearby, but since they are now charging $10 to dump and since it was out of the way, we decided to just wait until we got to our next destination. We don't like to travel with the extra weight of the gray water and black water, but the campground we were headed to in Salt Lake City had full hookups and was only an hour away.

Our next few posts will tell you about what we discovered in Salt Lake City, so stay tuned.