Roadtrip: Wyoming and Utah

Glenn and I did Utah this weekend. I’ve been wanting to put together a road trip to Utah for a while, since IKEA is notorious for its sky-high shipping costs (must be shipped direct from Sweden), and Draper, Utah is the closest physical location until Colorado gets its own. However, much as I love IKEA, it hardly seemed like a good reason to make the eight-hour drive to Utah – until Glenn told me about the Via Ferrata in Ogden.

Via Ferrata is a type of climbing route that is outfitted with metal rungs so that even normal people like me can climb a mountain (although some are more elaborate – Glenn says the one in West Virginia has a suspension bridge). They were first installed in Europe during WWII so armies were able to move large numbers of soldiers without mountaineering experience over the Alps. Since then, Via Ferratas have taken off in popularity over there, but there are only three in the US. I love climbing, but my skill level does not rate my enthusiasm, so Via Ferrata sounded perfect for me. Two reasons to make that drive to Utah finally spurred me to make plans.

I left work at four, hoping that we would be able to get an early start and beat rush hour traffic, but everyone else in the world had the same idea, so Glenn and I decided to wait a few hours until traffic died down, and we really got started around six or seven. He drove; I promptly fell asleep. When I awoke, we were at a rest stop underneath the Lincoln Memorial, which holds the dubious honor of being the creepiest monument I’ve ever seen.

It’s just Zombie Lincoln’s disembodied head atop a forty-foot wall. That’s it.

A great deal of wishful thinking on our part had us in Utah late Friday night, but we ended up spending the night at a rest stop in Wyoming. However, it was a blessing in disguise, as, freed of time constraints – we were already behind schedule anyway - we had an awesome time bumming around Wyoming on Saturday. We visited Fossil Butte National Monument and were so inspired by what we saw there, we visited Warfield Fossil Quarry, where we were given chisels and hammers and loosed on piles of slate in this former lake. I was not a very prolific fossil miner, especially after I dropped a rock on my finger, but the four fossils I did find were lovely - four pretty little fish, you can see all the little bones and everything. We also visited Kemmerer, Wyoming, home of the first J.C. Penney’s.

On our way up to the quarry, we had a close encounter with some cows grazing in a pasture. I’ve never been up close and personal with a cow, so Glenn was very patient while I tramped around trying to touch one. Every time it seemed like I was getting really close, they’d slowly turn and lumber away. I thought the way they looked right at me was so funny.

When my mother saw this picture, she laughed and said, “That’s my Kiki!” Incidentally, we have this inside joke in my family about cows and my mom, who grew up in the Bronx and summered at the family farm in Puerto Rico. She has a cousin who took advantage of my mother’s urban upbringing and filled her head with all sorts of lies about farm life, one of which was that cows only lie down when they’re dead. She lived for forty years believing him, until we moved to Colorado. During one of our family vacations, she spotted a whole herd of cows lying down in a pasture on the side of the road and exclaimed, “Look at all those dead cows! There must be some sort of sickness going around!” My father has never let her live it down.

I burned eight stand-up comedy CDs for the trip - Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and Dave Attell - but Glenn’s CD player couldn’t read CD-RWs. It is sort of an interesting anthropological experiment to listen to radio stations in other states, though (I had to entertain myself somehow). Who would have guessed that Utah has an entire station dedicated to femi-rock? Unsurprisingly, Wyoming doesn’t play anything besides country music and classic rock. Also funny were the various signs that lined the highway. Two really cracked me up. One was for a truck stop, Mom’s Country Kitchen Cookery or something like that (every restaurant in Wyoming is Country Kitchen something), and underneath the logo, it listed the following amenities in this order: “Food, Parking, Beer, Gas, Exotic Knives.” I’m not a trucker so I can’t speak for them, but after driving on I-80 for eight hours, I sure could have used a beer and a katana. The second simply said:

Wyoming
Beef Country
Uintah County
Cattle Women

No one I’ve discussed this with has been able to give me a satisfactory explanation for why someone chose those particular words and put them in that particular order and then made a sign out of it.

Saturday night saw us in Provo, Utah. We saw Inception (my second time, Glenn’s first) and went to bed relatively early, as we had a busy day of shopping for reasonably priced Scandinavian furniture on Sunday!

A note on Utah: I am ashamed to admit this, but I really thought that Utah would be a lot more Mormon than it was. I checked, and the hotels just had regular old Bibles in the drawers. I could not find a single Mormon talk radio station. There were no clean-cut young men in suits walking around distributing pamphlets. I was a little disappointed. I guess Mormons are actually people, too???? What?

On Sunday morning, we visited Timpanogos Cave National Monument. After a rather strenuous hike up, we went through three caves.

This formation was called the “heart” of the cave.

And then… IKEA! I went wild in textiles, and I also found a nice little Gustavian X-back chair on clearance. Pics of my revamped bedroom soon to come. I was wary of bringing Glenn shopping (very few people can match my endurance for shopping), but he behaved very well and he even enjoyed looking at the kitchen gadgets and the weird Swedish food.

Due to a scheduling mishap (we’d intended to go on Sunday), Monday was Via Ferrata, on four hours of sleep. We were met at six in the morning by two very cool seventeen-year-old boys called Andrew and Talon, and they led Glenn, me, and another couple, up to the climbs. The female half of the other couple was not very comfortable with heights, so her husband accompanied her on one of the easier climbs while Glenn and I advanced to the most difficult one.

On the way up, the guides pointed out this mountain to us. It’s the mountain that inspired the Paramount Pictures logo.

It must be from another direction, because I can't see it at all.

Here’s how the Via Ferrata works: alongside the metal rungs, there were bits of steel cable bolted into the mountainside, and you clip yourself into each length as you progress; that acts as your safety should you fall (which I didn’t). My mother asked me after I got home if I get scared being up so high, and I guess I do. I’m not a really great judge of distance, so I can never tell how high off the ground I am - maybe that’s why I can climb up walls and look over cliffs and not be terribly bothered. Also, the rocks at the base were so large, we never seemed higher than twenty feet off the ground, although I’m sure we were.

What goes up must come down, and that’s where I shake apart. There is a trail down from the tops of the climbs, but it’s long and out of the way, so, in a foolish moment of supreme overconfidence, I agreed to down-climb the easiest climb. Halfway down, I was officially panicking, and, as is my wont when I panic, I started crying; it’s an embarrassing habit I was never able to outgrow. But it was scary dangling helplessly by your arms and hoping your feet would come into contact with something solid! When I finally got on the ground, one of the guides helped me concoct a more exciting story than the actual series of events. I was down before the guide got there, and then I had to climb back up to rescue Glenn and a group of orphans who’d gotten lost during a hike… so, uh yeah, I rescued orphans on my trip to Utah.

It was a wonderful busy weekend, but I don’t think I’m going to be planning any more 8+ hour road trips for a long time.