Salt Lake was Great

Hi again everyone,

It's about time I updated this as we seem to have been pretty busy over the last week and there are quite a few pictures to post. I've also added a link, over on the left, to a map so that you can 'See Where We've Been'. I'll try and keep that up to date as well.

Last Saturday (11th) we set off for our first look at Salt Lake City. It was about a 9 - 10 hour drive diagonally across Wyoming but unfortunately the car the people we were travelling with broke down along the way and that added about 2hrs to the trip.

Salt Lake was a great place and we wish the project was based here. The whole city is surrounded by huge snow capped mountains and some of the best ski fields in the world are only 10 minutes away. There are about a million people in the city, it was really easy to get around and it was great to have a wander about and do a bit of sightseeing.
While we were in Salt Lake we went and caught up with one of my mates from Brisbane (Justin) who is over here working on the Kennecott Copper project. He lives at the base of one of the mountains and his wife was able to take Gae on a two day shopping spree around the city. We needed a bigger car just to get the stuff home.




First stop on everyone's first visit to SLC, and we were no different, is the Mormon Temple so there are a couple of photo's below. Those of you from Brisbane might recognise the gold statue at the top, very similar to the one on top of the Kangaroo Point cliffs




Salt Lake City was where they held the 2002 winter olympics so on our way out of the city to come home we called into the olympic town, called Park City. It's at the top of the pass leading east and is now a really popular place to stay and shop. Lot's of expensive places to spend your money and you can be having a beer in one of the restaurants or bars and walk across the street to a chair lift that will take you to the olympic ski runs.
In one of the photo's below you can see a lot of runs at the top of the mountains. That photo was taken coming into Park City. The other photos are of the main street, one of the chair lifts and a few of the houses in the surounding hills.








After leaving SLC we decided to take a different road back up through central Wyoming and it was amazing how much the countryside changed as we went through it. There are a couple of photos in almost desert conditions just outside Green River in the South West of the state.
In one of the landscape pictures (blow it up to full size) you can just make out the I80 freeway cutting across the centre of the photo. This freeway connects San Francisco with New York and we have never seen so many semi-trailers in the one spot at the one time. All doing 80mph and you just have to keep out of their way.
There is also a photo of some wild horses taken on our way home.







Next weekend is a four day weekend for Thanksgiving so we are off across the Big Horn mountains to Cody, a town built by Buffalo Bill. Hopefully we'll get some skiing and snow mobiling in while we are away.