Friday July 18, 2014

 

Non-Travel Day

 

Today we headed north on I-15 to UT 83 west and the“Golden Spike National Historic Site” . 
This is the point at which the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad met on May 10, 1869 to create the first transcontinental railroad. They had crossed 1,776 miles
of desert, rivers, and mountains to join the east and west. There are two steam locomotives at the site that are reproductions of those that created the iconic picture of the ceremony on that May day; both are operational, and today they ran one of them in a demonstration of how they operate. At the Visitor’s Center Valerie noted a beautiful green rock in the buildings wall, and upon inquiring about it she was informed that it came from a quarry 80 miles to the west, and that this is the only place in the U.S. that it is quarried. So off we went in search of the green rock, the town that the quarry was supposed to be located in was a desolate place and there was no sign of the quarry. Traveling down the highway we did locate an old excavation where there were some scrap pieces of the green rock and using discretion we picked up several pieces, we did have to limit what we took because we didn’t want to add to much weight to the truck.