August 5, 2010 - Day 4 Part 5
Entering Provo
On
an earlier page I promised more photos of the many wind farms we saw on
our trip west. This one was near the state line.
Not long after we spotted it we saw this "Welcome to Utah" sign advertising their many ski resorts.
Looks like someone has already found his own personal "resort."
We stopped at a welcome center in Echo Canyon. Linda took the following photos there.
I thought the walls were pock marked with some rather odd looking "holes." Notice from the size of the full-grown trees at the top of this photo just how large those holes were!
Speaking of holes, we saw these things all over the place. These were created by ground squirrels. The forest ranger where we stopped said they only come out of the ground to mate in the spring time. The rest of the time they remain underground.
Smaller holes like these were created by voles, a mouse-like mammal that stays underground it's hole life (pun intended).
I went inside this unusual visitors' center for maps and information.
As we prepared to leave we saw this view of what was ahead.
We were rather surprised how naturally green it was on the Utah side of these mountains. These sheep had plenty of grass to graze upon.
We made it to I-15 south to Provo. One of the last sights we saw before our arrival was this very strange looking old building. Turns out it was a large Harley-Davidson dealership.
Provo is bordered on it's west side by Utah Lake, a very large, fresh water lake that flows north into the Great Salt Lake via the 51-mile-long Jordan River. At 24 miles long by 13 miles wide, Utah Lake is the 3rd largest natural fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes. It's 4,489 feet above sea level. Residents of Utah Valley love to use it for boating and fishing but for some strange reason no one swims in it.
The name "Deseret" means "Honey Bee." It was the original name of the territory before it was officially named "Utah" after the Ute Indians.
In closing I had to include a closeup photo of the "Y" representing Brigham Young University (BYU) which has something on the order of 30,000 students living near here. This is most definitely a college town. What's really unusual, though, is the "MTC", the Missionary Training Center of the LDS Church.
Because the "Y" and the "MTC" are magnets for people fluent in foreign languages, Provo area high schools teach teens many foreign languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin, and Arabic, as well as American Sign Language. Numerous other languages are taught by volunteers.
There were so many people here fluent in so many languages that, when the Olympics was hosted in Salt Lake a few years back, not only did they find plenty of translators, even cab drivers could be found to speak any language a visitor desired.
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This ends the photos of our trip west. I'll create other web pages of our travels here in Utah as we experience them.