Traveling Old Trails

It seems like it immediately gets greener when you cross the border from Utah into Colorado. This is at least partly due to a bend in the Colorado River which creates a wide flood plain that the farmers have taken advantage of by developing extensive irrigation systems. The first town on Route 50 is Fruita, then comes Grand Junction, then Fruitville, so it's obviously a lush valley. the picture above was taken from the Colorado National Monument looking across the Fruita Valley toward Utah. The background looks almost bleached compared to the foreground. The "Grand Junction" that gives the primary city here its name is the joining of the Colorado River with the more southerly Gunnison. Everything here is "Grand", Grand Valley, Grand Mesa, I guess the founders liked their location. The adjective than I cannot avoid for this place is "gentrified" and since I was here last it has even become pretentious. I took a back route from the national mo...

From my front door I drove to Interstate 15 and headed south to U.S. Highway 6 at Spanish Fork, Utah, where, turning east I began my journey to the Santa Fe Trail. My traveling of an old trail begins in Spanish Fork Canyon where Route 6 parallels the Union Pacific rail line. This is currently the route of Amtrak's California Zephyr and is heavily used to haul freight and coal as well. The miles from Spanish Fork to Helper are steep and difficult but this line was developed to bring coal from Carbon County to the west side of the Wasatch Range to provide fuel for industry, especially copper smelting. This map shows my route to The Old Spanish Trail in green and the Utah section of the Trail itself in purple. Map courtesy of d-maps.com. At the top of Spanish Fork Canyon is Soldier Summit an area of windswept open range. The streams that originate here drain westward into Utah Lake or eastward into the Colorado system. Continuing past the summit, the serpentine highway be...

Salt Lake City, Utah where I now live, sits near the confluence of a number of trails which have had important roles in the lives of the people who have used them as the thoroughfares of their lives. The first inhabitants traversed the canyon trails of the Wasatch Range and the desert  trails of the Great Basin on seasonal quests for food and trade. the horses so prized by the Shoshone and Utes made there way up the Old Spanish Trail and developed into successful emigrants. Fur trappers followed the trails of their indigenous predecessors and used this knowledge to aid explorers like John C. Fremont. In the 1840's it got serious. The almost simultaneous incidents of the discovery of gold in California, the Mexican War, and the Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley, turned the Oregon trail, California Trail and Mormon Trail into well used highways of migration west in spite of the difficulties they presented. Some of the feats accomplished during this era ...