This is the Mormon church, but we couldn't go in because we aren't members of the church. We did see a woman who just got married and was taking pictures outside the church in her wedding dress. Pretty cool.
We did get to go inside the huge convention center and got a personalized tour of the multi-million dollar building. This is a glass art piece hanging from a skylight.
Looking up at the skylight
There is actually a park on top of the building. It used to be open to the public but was shut down for security reasons after 9/11. Now, only people working in the building are allowed up there. It's a great place to eat your lunch! All native plants and trees were planted on the rooftop, along with a water feature that flows across the length of the building and off the side. It's an amazing engineering design to have the building hold all the granite, water, plants, dirt, etc on top, AND without having any pillars in the convention center to block people's view of the giant stage.
Looking through the trees down on the city and the mountains in the background
After our tour of Salt Lake City, we took a scenic driving tour through the mountains on our way to Wyoming. Our first sight of snow we had to stop. This was around 7,000 feet.
These crazy trees were everywhere. Their trunks grew zig-zag! Might be from the snow??
We actually got up to 9,000 feet! Very high. We could definitely tell that the air was thinner and it was harder to breathe.
The view looking out our hotel window:
While Dustin was interviewing I was going to go on a 6 mile hike along the river. However, when I got there, the path was closed because the river had flooded the trail. Boo hoo :(
Later that night we went for a daring drive to see the wild horses. All the research warned you should take a truck, a spare tire, axe, days food and water rations, etc. But we decided to try it. We made it 5 miles in before turning around. The dirt road got too bad for our Mazda 6 rental :) We didn't see any horses, but we did see one antelope (pictured below but can't really see it). Plus the skies were turning dark and we could tell the pouring rain was about to start. Luckily, we got back to concrete right as the skies opened.
Thursday, we took another scenic driving tour on our way back to Salt Lake City. This was through the Flaming Gorge. Supposedly, it's a gorgeous drive. But the whole time it was raining so we couldn't see much. We did however catch a few glimpses of the flaming red dirt.
Once back in Utah we stopped at the great copper mine. This is the largest working copper mine in the world. It's the only man-made object that can be seen from space! This thing was HUGE!
Those tiny specks of trucks are over 50 feet high!
Of course, we had to watch the video in the Visitor Center. It was pretty interesting but not much info on how they actually mine it.
We also stopped in Park City, UT for lunch (you know, where the Winter Olympics were held?). Pretty cool place. All the buildings looked the same and it was hard to find lunch while driving and trying to read tiny signs. But the views were awesome and those houses up on the hill had to be very expensive. It was cool seeing the ski slopes uncovered though.
Our flight left at 9:30 that night so we had a lot of time to explore Salt Lake City. It's so gorgeous there, being surrounded by the snow-capped mountains....
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