Day Three - Salt Lake City, Utah to Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Back on the open road! Well, later anyway. The route to Salt Lake was pretty standard interstate highway, with all the commercial trimmings. Also a lot of suburban developments - possibly well worth it with a great backdrop of snow peaked mountains.We stopped at Salt Lake City, the main attraction being Temple Square. I certainly had mixed feelings about visiting this place, given the LDS church's support for Prop. 8, but I was also curious to see it. So we stopped and ended up going on a little free tour they offer. We saw the Tabernacle and another conference building. They threw in a lot to encourage people to "learn more" and send away for information, etc. Kind of intriguing religion. I later did some reading about it and, well, this isn't the place for my critique, but there are a lot of interesting parts of its history that don't match up so well with what they were saying. On top of that I have a real big problem with taking Scripture literally, so it's not too surprising how I feel. Anyway, the Temple Square was very nicely landscaped, which I could appreciate. There were even some quail there!

Then we got back on the road, passing through Idaho briefly - and some really gorgeous forests (Cache National Forest), climbing and descending again and again. Bear Lake there was particularly lovely - shades of blue I thought you would only see in the islands, like turquoise! We stopped at an Oregon Trail history museum which was interesting - lots of items from the pioneer days and early railroads there, as well as a gallery of paintings depicting Oregon Trail scenes.
We then entered Wyoming! Everything we have seen so far has been wonder-ful, but Wyoming may be my favorite yet. It is just beautiful - lots of mountains and green fields, rivers and lakes. We were still climbing lots of hills and mountain passes and as we began to approach Jackson Hole, the weather really kicked in. We decided to spend the night there (no internet access, hence all these late entries!), and possibly the next, using a hotel as a base to visit the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone if it were really bad. We stopped for an amazing dinner in downtown Jackson and then hunkered down in the hotel for the night.(The main square in Jackson has antelope horn arches at some of the entrances - of course we had to do the tourist thing and take photos underneath them!)

Please see this link for more photos from Day Three- many from the forests and Bear Lake. I haven't had a chance to go through them and take out any blurry or bad ones, so bear (haha) with me! Also, I haven't had too much time to do anything with the video I've been taking. That may have to wait until we get back to CT because I'll need time to sit with it and edit into the smaller portions. But I have plenty of photos, as you will see.