Salt Lake City
October 2026 ..
Approaching Salt Lake City (SLC) we crossed the Bonneville Salt Flats and stopped briefly at the entrance to the ‘speed way’ for a picture. There were no speed trials going on, so we continued on our way. On the way into SLC we discovered that you could do a tour of an Amazon Fulfilment Centre. Proved to be really interesting, although Dave was surprised at how much manual labour was involved, thinking he would see a highly automated facility. In reality it was not much different to the Royal Mail sorting centres Dave used to work on back in his days at Royal Mail Research & Development. The only difference was the robot farm that stored goods in automated moving containers. But people populated the containers and also picked from them as orders are made up. The clever automation tells people where to put and where to retrieve. The employees are switched around in their tasks to avoid prolonged repetitive behaviour and Francine noticed that they have on-screen reminders with instructions to take exercise/stretching breaks at their workstations. No photos were allowed inside the facility – sorry!
In the afternoon we drove up the Mill Creek Canyon and hiked 11km up to an outlook over the city. The Fall colours here were just fantastic.
In the evening we attended an ice hockey match (Utah vs Oklahoma) – Dave had wanted to do this for a while. The seats were a bit hard (those in the know brought their own seat cushions!) and we weren’t entirely sure what was going on, rule-wise, but it was certainly fast paced entertainment!
The next day we drove up to Antelope Island – home of herds of bison and other animals. We camped there for a couple of nights and hiked 11km around part of the island.
SLC is famous as the headquarters of the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and we managed to park downtown to visit the extensive Temple complex there. We were able to attend one of the excellent organ recitals in the Tabernacle and marvel at the acoustics of the large auditorium. The organ itself has 11,623 pipes and looked incredibly difficult to play, but the music was beautiful. Only afterwards did we discover we had been scammed (after scanning a fake QR code in the parking lot); paying for a fictitious cable channel instead of the parking fee! Fortunately, we noticed immediately, our bank was able to cancel the payments and we informed the parking lot operator.
Leaving SLC we took the East Alpine Loop Road through the Uinta National Forest, camping three nights high up near the summit, hiking another 4km and spotting a moose out of the kitchen window.
From here we headed west towards Colorado.
