Boise and Salt Lake City

I’m catching up. In the last week we have been in four states. Last Sunday we were at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. We left there Monday morning and drove to Pendleton, Oregon, a half-way point on our way to Boise, Idaho. We just spent one night in Pendleton, but managed to make our way to the Pendleton Wool Factory store. We got there too late for the tours that they give, but we watched a woman running a loom (?) making a blanket through a glass partition. I also bought a couple of cotton shirts and Lannas almost bought a fedora:).

Tuesday morning we left for Boise. We saw lots of potato, onion, and hay fields. The RV Park in Boise was quite nice, with lots of grass for Toby to sniff. One evening when we were out walking her, a man came out of his RV with a Giant Schnauzer. She was 14 years old, solid black, and about the size of a Great Dane! Toby and I were both a little intimidated, although he assured us she was very gentle.

The capitol in Boise was quite lovely. It is rather traditional, sandstone exterior and was recently updated and remodeled. There is a statue in front of the capitol of Frank Steunenberg, governor of Idaho around the turn of the last century. They stated that he was governor during a period of “organized lawlessness”. He was assassinated a few years after he left office.

Thursday morning we left very early (well, it was actually 7:50 – very early for me these days) for a long drive to Salt Lake City. Friday we went to Temple Square in Salt Lake City. It is amazing! There is so much to see. The Temple is quite magnificent, but the one building in the Square that non-Mormons are not allowed to go into. In the Visitor Center they show models of it and describe the purpose of each room in the Temple. We got to the Tabernacle, where the Choir performs, just in time to attend an organ recital. It was wonderful! We toured the Assembly Hall, went to the top (26^th floor) of the Church Office Building, and toured the Conference Center. The Conference Center was built in 2000 and seats 21,000 people. Just like the Temple, the Tabernacle, and the Assembly Hall, it also has a huge organ. The landscaping all over Temple Square is just beautiful! One of the tour guides told us that volunteers maintain all of them. The pictures below are the Temple, inside the Mormon Tabernacle, a room inside the Beehive House (Brigham Young's home), and the Assembly Hall.

After going back to the RV to let Toby out for a while, we went back into SLC. This time we went to the capitol, just a few blocks from Temple Square. It is a lovely building. The lawns were beautiful, but there were not many trees around it. We found out later that a rare tornado came through downtown Salt Lake City in 1999 and took out all the trees.

The next day we planned to visit the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in the morning and go back to Temple Square in the afternoon. When we got to the mine, they told us we could not enter until noon because they were blasting too close to a road we would use! So…..we went back to Temple Square. We took a tour of the Beehive House, the lovely restored home of Brigham Young. Two young missionaries, one from Albania and another from Armenia, were our guides through the house. Then we went to the Church History Museum. They do a wonderful job preserving and displaying relics of the past.

After going back to the RV again to let Toby out, we went back to the Bingham Canyon mine. It was about a 30 minute drive, and well worth the time… both times. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto and operated by their subsidiary Kennecott Utah Copper. This mine is the largest open pit mine in the world – 2¾ miles across and ¾ mile deep. Watching the huge trucks running throughout the mine is fascinating! It’s like watching a beehive from the inside. At the Visitor Center they have displays and a 20 minute video that describes the process of mining, concentrating, and refining the low-grade ore. Amazingly, gold and silver are by-products of the process – they must be making a bundle these days with the price of gold!