Adventures with Wolfgang: This is the Place!

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

This is the Place!

Location: Willard Bay State Park, Utah

We woke early this morning and our campsite was really beautiful as the sun first came over the mountain. We were about the same distance from Salt Lake City as the Russell Clan was on their trip, so we headed there first thing.

We drove the very winding route that the original Mormon pioneers had used to reach Salt Lake City in 1847. It turns out the poor Donner Party had been there a year earlier and spent 13 days cutting the trail through this area. That delay is what caused disaster for them when they got to the Sierras. The Mormon group made it through in only 6 days, thanks to the Donner Party's earlier work. The view from the pass above the valley was stunning this morning. An amazing number of bike riders were going both up and down this very steep road.

At the bottom of this long decent we stopped at the This Is The Place Heritage Park. This is the spot where Brigham Young is supposed to have recognized all the proper elements from his dream, so that he knew this was the place where Mormons should settle. Here I am proclaiming to Debi that This is the Place!

We walked around a bunch of the huge bronze statues in this place and through their gift shop. Let's just say that these guys take their historic bronze statues really seriously, perhaps a little too much so.

Our next stop was Temple Square, which Laurie wrote about at great length, but had only this to say about the "beehive house". "Brigham Young's beehive house was very odd." We toured this house, which was Brigham's first house and office from which he administered the Mormon Church. The beehive name comes from the beehive ornament which adorns the top of the building, which is symbolic of the industriousness which is so prized by the Mormon faith. Our tour guides were two young women, one of whom was probably one of the more socially awkward people you would ever want to meet. The house didn't seem that odd to us, but the hard sell of the Mormon faith was intense. One couple in our tour even bailed because they couldn't take the propoganda. Anyway, if any of you need a Family Proclamation Document, we would be glad to pass ours along.

We were really blown away with how truly imaculate everything was within the Temple Square. It had a strange feeling of being almost unreal, to the point where I actually felt several times like I was looking at a computer simulation rather than a real place. This is the Salt Lake Temple, with a gold angel at the very top.

The attention to the flower gardens within the Temple Square was actually unbelievable. At one point we passed a group of maybe ten young people giving some really intensive attention to one particular flower bed. One poor guy was even picking single blades of tiny weeds out of an almost perfect bed of mossy ground cover. All this attention really paid off, because the multitude of gorgeous flower beds was really jaw dropping.

We also attended a noon concert in the Tabernacle which featured their massive pipe organ. Featured in the concert were two famous pieces by Bach, a traditional Mormon hymn, which is played at every concert, and the Thunderer March by John Phillip Sousa, as the finale. My sisters, Nancy & Polly, will appreciate that I was unable to listen to a Souza march played on an organ without thinking of our father's enthusiastic attempts at playing "Under the Double Eagle" on our family Hammond organ (which never sounded the same after our family dog clawed at all the vacuum tubes in back while chasing a mouse).

Here Debi is attempting to become Brigham Young's second wife. You will notice that he appears to be unmoved by her advances, despite her very sincere gaze.

We wanted to see one landmark which Laurie described..."A block or two from the capitol is a great archway and on top is a wooden angel, goldplated however, which is supposed to have come from the entrance of Brigham Young's ranch." We saw this arch downtown, which features an eagle atop a beehive, and wondered, if this was the arch, when had the angel become an eagle. We actually questioned about seven different people about this, and were told that only the eagle had every appeared above the archway. We finally concluded that Laurie must have transposed the position of the eagle on top of the archway with the golden angel who is prominently displayed on top of the Mormon Temple.

We also toured the Capitol building, which Debi and I also thought was amazingly grand and impressive, certainly more than the State capitol building in Sacramento, and probably more so than the National capitol building in Washington D.C. The exterior was very impressive, but the scale and grandure of the interior with its amazing murals, really blew our minds, particularly when compared with the state capitol building in Cheyenne.

Here's one interior shot of which gives you some idea of the grandiose scale of this place. The natural light coming through the glass ceiling is really quite amazing.

One mystery item in the capitol building which we spent quite a while sluthing about was a piano which Laurie described in length. "A pioneer woman had brought it from Virginia...During an Indian uprising they fled with the piano to some other place in Utah and for some years lived in a two room cabin. She had five children who grew up sharing the crowded space, and when the roof leaked, they slept under the piano." Nobody in the capitol building knew anything about a piano, but they suggested we look in the Daughter of Pioneers Museum down the street.

At this other museum we saw the original eagle that had sat atop the arch way until a contractor had backed his truck into the archway and made it collapse. We also saw some of the covered wagons and stage coaches that had impressed the Russell Clan on their visit.

We even saw this very impressive restored horse-drawn fire engine from 1902. But the only piano that anyone wanted us to see was the one that had been wrapped in buffalo skins and buried for a year somewhere along the pioneer trail, only to have it be in perfect condition when it was unearthed again. We finally went back to the front desk and told our story again to two other volunteers. They said: "Oh, there are a couple of pianos on the second floor you should look at."

Sure enough, one of the pianos there had more of the less romantized story where because of a miscommunication the piano had been stored under a tent which leaked, and the family had sought shelter under the piano itself. Laurie claimed "the wood was still in good condition", while in fact water stains are clearly showing from the ordeal. But we had found the mystery piano! It turns out all of the items in this museum were originally diplayed in the capitol building while this building was being built. We felt triumphant in our search.

All of this museum viewing, and the stiffling 100 degree heat outside was enough for us, so we went in search of a campite. On the way we stopped for burgers and a chocolate malt at a local place that was started the same year Debi was born.

Soon we found a campsite and got ourselves over to cool off in the nearby lake. Here's me conquering a big water slide we found in the middle of the lake.