Near the Spiral Jetty is the Golden Spike National Historic Site, where the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad met as they worked to join the eastern and western United States. Two stops and interesting sites in one detour! The Golden Spike Monument has a small visitors center and shows a short video about the building of the railroad, as well as the railroad tie where the golden spike was driven. They have a replica of the spike (the actual spike is at Stanford University), and replicas of the two trains that chugged into place as the rails came together. Usually they have regular reenactments of the driving, but there is broken track that will likely be repaired next month, so you can only see them in the train house. We got to climb into one, however, and ring the bell on the front.
Brandt and Blythe standing at the very site of the union.
There are no spikes in the tie because of the reenactments,
but that's the spot.
We left the trains to journey to the Spiral Jetty. The jetty is an earthwork sculpture on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, truly in the middle of nowhere. It's almost sixteen miles from the Golden Spike Monument, along a gravel road. It is the work of Robert Smithson, an artist, and was constructed in 1970 out of mud and basalt rocks. It forms a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide counterclockwise coil that juts into the water from the shore of the lake. It is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged, depending on the water level of the lake. At the moment it is nowhere near submerged. The nearest water is probably half a mile away. Kent and I had been to see it years ago, before children, and when we went, there was water around it, a sort of pinkish hued water, with salt covering all the rocks making them white. Now the dark rock is exposed, there is little salt on it, and the landscape around it very barren. We saw the remnants of a dead seagull and little else. I didn't realize it, but this year the Spiral Jetty was named Utah's official state work of art.
The children were not thrilled about continuing on to the jetty, but we had come all that way, and I told them, since we had come and they were old enough to remember it, we wouldn't have to go see it ever again. We walked the length of the jetty, stared in wonder over the vastness of the lake and landscape, then walked back to the car. It might have been somewhat underwhelming for several in our party.
The landscape we drove through to get to the Spiral Jetty.
Someone is not thrilled about this stop.
The Spiral Jetty from the parking lot.
Looking out into the lake.
Water is far away.
It's our very own Moon landscape.
An intrepid plant growing in the middle of the jetty path in the salty sand.
Fulfilling the measure of its creation.
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