Back home and it is still a beautiful place to visit. The KOA is way downtown past the fairgrounds and in a place which was pretty much a no-man’s-land when I was growing up. Now Salt Lake City has exploded and is one huge megalopolis from before the top of Parley’s Canyon clear past the airport. Such a change! 
Years ago my dad started sleuthing through the old buildings at Fort Douglas. He found things like old playing cards, button, bottles and other discarded stuff. Because he wanted to preserve the Fort from the encroachment of the University of Utah, he started a museum detailing the history of the military in Utah and he worked hard to get many of the old historical buildings on the National Historic Register. Because of this, after his death, the military named the museum building in his honor. Outside there is a nice little park with various pieces of equipment like this howitzer that Mark was responsible for aiming during his stint in the army. The Post Chapel is where we were married so very long ago. It has been “updated” to include green carpeting and removal of the pews, and the original slate roof is gone, but it still stands! Next we are off to Southern Utah!
Month: October 2014
WYOMING, WILD AND WOOLY
So it’s been a while since my last post but as time goes on it will all become clear!
Anyway, we drove from The Black Hills to Devil’s Tower. It was clear and beautiful when we got there and we camped right at the base of the tower.
The campground is where the cast and crew lived during the filming of Close Encounters. It’s way out in the country with not much around it except beautiful scenery. The next day we went to the park and walked around the tower. It was very foggy and Mark kept telling it was a cloak for the aliens.
Because there was snow predicted we decided to make a run for Cheyenne.
Here is the beautiful capital of Wyoming. We walked through it. Very impressive. Wyoming is the Equality State because it was the first government in the world to give women the vote! They also had the first woman governor.
Mark with a bison and me with a dinosaur
femur. The last full week of July Wyoming celebrates Frontier Days in Cheyenne. I was sitting on a curb slightly hung over in 1965 when a cowboy from the parade rode his horse into a bar for a beer. Today the town isn’t so much Hell on Wheels as a big old LTD circa 1990 slewing down the road. It’s all cleaned up and sanitized, but the memories are still fresh and ripe!
Here is a high point of the trip for me! We went back to the University about 50 years after I began my education there. Like Cheyenne, it has really changed!
The great old buildings are all there including Old Main pictured below and the dorms I stayed in. They are adding on to the Half Acre Gym and they have rebuilt the Student Union, but the flavor and the prettiness of the campus still abound. What floored me was the distance from one end of campus to the other didn’t seem nearly as long as when I was plowing through the snow in 40 mph winds with my hair freezing after swimming.
We saw a great museum in the Geology building, drove up to the Snowy Range, and toured the old Territorial jail which was once a place that incarcerated Butch Cassidy. When I went to school here the jail was used as a barn for the Ag Deptartment. So glad they recognized the great history there and fixed the place up!
Next we took two days and went to Utah. I will post about this soon!
Mark and Kathie's Excellent Adventure 