Tall Stacks and Salty Lakes

We are now the Traveling Sellers... I guess.  From Florida to Maryland, now to Utah and a lot of places in between, the general purpose of this blog has been to share our adventures with family and friends who weren’t there at the time, and we’ve had a lot of exciting travels here and there!  Well, “exciting” is used liberally, but if you enjoy pictures of cannons and random parks, then this has definitely been at least an interesting blog to read.  Hopefully.  So here we go again… this time we took a little drive up to Magna, UT to see a couple of things.  Now Magna is a little rural area to the west of Salt Lake on I-80, and if you ask Becky… it’s her future home.  Ok, not so much, she wasn’t too impressed.  But it lies on the southern border of the Great Salt Lake (which we’d never seen from the ground), and it was home to – and this is the exciting part – the 33^rd tallest free-standing man-made structure in the world!!  And that is why I had to go check it out.  Seriously.  The Kennecott mine dominates the Oquirrh Mountains, pulling copper and other precious metals from the ground, and they built this smokestack 1,200 feet tall (more than twice the height of the Washington Monument) to spew chemicals up into the air and out of the valley.  Impressive, but it didn’t actually look that tall.  

Of course, Paul wanted his picture by the smokestack.  It's basically a cannon pointed directly up, so it only made sense.  If only we could get him to sit on it somehow...

 The Great Salt Lake was bitter, bitter cold on this day, but it was pretty impressive, and somewhat intimidating with the waves and gusts of wind.  It's the largest salt water lake in the western hemisphere they say, but at its deepest it's only 33 feet deep.  Pretty cool to see.

But we didn't stay long, the arctic winds drove us away as we ran for the cover of the car.  We'll have to go back on a warmer day, I'm sure.  But we did get to see the smokestack, and that of course was a journey only we would take… I think… I hope.  Maybe not exciting, probably not even interesting, but that’s what you get on this blog.  Ha!