The Desert

Some of you know that I was given an assignment for a Relief Society class to come up with things to do in the Salt Lake area that are free/inexpensive. It kind of took over my life. I spent all my free hours online looking for cool things. I made an 18 page spreadsheet of places to go. Then I started to look for events and that took another 4-5 pages.

I am so glad that I did it. But it was a never ending thing. I could have found things forever, but I had to stop somewhere. School ends tomorrow and I need to go do some of those things now.

While I was talking to my mom about it. She mentioned that she wanted to go on the Pony Express trail with us. She specifically mentioned that she did not want to go during the hot summer. So we made plans to go on Memorial Day. If you don't know, we have had an extremely cool/cold spring so it was not too hot like it might have been other Memorial Days. I think it was 78ish as a high.

So we started at Camp Floyd which is really only 25 minutes from our house. You go on Redwood Road to state road 73 (I think) which is in Saratoga springs and head west to Fairfield. Camp Floyd is marked with a sign on the east of the road.

This was the first time I have ever been through the new(ish) Eagle Mountain City. When I was younger, my parents took us out the the same spot that this city is in and we would shoot targets, explore the desert and learn how to drive (as 14, 15 year olds!). It was in the middle of nowhere. Not anymore.

Little did we know, but on Memorial Day and Labor Day, Camp Floyd has a reinactment of what the camp was like in Civil War times. We showed up on a great day for this.

They had teepees up for kids to play in.

They had a drill sargent teach the boys how to march wearing authentic civil war stuff. (Alex was a little afraid of the guy and would not come out of the teepee.) If I remember, I will put a little video on at the end of this blog.

Yes the hats were a little floppy.


Then we started following the Pony Express Trail. They had a marker about every 12-16 miles. The first one was just in the desert. There was nothing around. Look at how desolate it looks. But it was a really fun stop. The boys were chasing lizards everywhere. It is a really good thing that they didn't catch one. We also discovered that there are 500,000 red ants per square foot in the West Desert. This was also a fun activity for the little boys. They LOVE bugs.

This is what the markers look like. This is in Faust, Utah. I don't think you can call 4 houses within a mile of each other a town. But this is where one of the ancesters of James E. Faust was employed by the Pony Express. (But then he didn't like the desert and moved to civilization.)

Lookout Pass was a fun place to stop. It was up in a "mountain" area where we got to hike around a bit. The kids loved that.

I had to put this picture in. Chase is such a good boy, but he is two. He was in a bit of a pout here and it makes me laugh. You can see the red desert flowers blooming along the trail. It was more pretty in real life.

Binoculars are fun.

This is a pet cemetary that has survived for a hundred years. I don't know what is weirder: that this is the only structure that has survived, or that they built it in the first place.

This is what a lot of the view is as you are driving.
Simpson Springs stop had a building and a springs so we stayed there longer and had lunch.

I love my parents- aren't they so cute?

OK, so the internet talks all about these geode beds that you can just walk around and find geodes. So if you know Jaxon, you know that we had to go there. He is all about rocks and crystals and stuff. There was a sign telling where to turn off the main road, but we didn't know where to go or what to do after that. We didn't find full geodes, but we did find parts of them. It was like other people had split some and left pieces of them behind. The area was fun to explore in though. Next time we will bring shovels and maybe more information about where to look.

In the geode area, there was this sand hill. The boys loved playing in the sand. This is what they thought the desert would be- sandy.

I think Alex was looking at a bug. We are all about bugs with four boys at our house.

Chase was climbing the hill and it was so fun to watch him. It is hard to climb on sand as he found out.

He kind of gave up. Then Grandpa yelled, "You can do it, keep going!" Then he got up and made it to the top!
It was too much driving, but it was fun to go somewhere that we have never gone before. The trail goes on for a lot longer but we had to leave at 4:00 so we could make it home for dinner. Next time-- maybe longer.