Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
As the contest proceeded, public interest increased and the entire country watched to see which company would win the big government subsidies through the mountains. Through the winter of 1868 the work continued on the Union Pacific with unabated energy, and freezing weather caught the builders at the base of the Wasatch Mountains; but blizzards could not stop them.
Passing over the Wasatch by way of Spanish Fork, he again entered the valley of the Colorado on the head-waters of the Uinta, pausing briefly at Roubidoux's Fort on Uinta River. Soon after he left, the fort and its occupants were annihilated by the Utes.
On the 24th of July, 1847, Brigham Young and a few followers pitched their tents at the base of the Wasatch Range a spur of the Rocky Mountains. This was the nucleus of what is now known as the flourishing city of Salt Lake. These pioneers came across the vast plains, over the desolate mountains and entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake through Emigration Canon.
On the west it merges into the Wasatch Mountains; on the north it descends by wooded slopes into the Uinta Valley. Its summit is forest-clad and among the forests are many beautiful parks. On the south it ends in a great escarpment which descends into Castle Valley. This southern escarpment presents one of the most wonderful facades of the world. It is from 2,000 to 4,000 feet high.
Looking from the Wasatch barrier, the colonists gazed upon a scene of entrancing though forbidding beauty. A barren, arid plain, rimmed by mountains like a literal basin, still occupied in its lowest parts by the dregs of what had once filled it to the brim; no green meadows, not a tree worthy the name, scarce a patch of greensward to entice the adventurous wanderers into the valley.
Outflows of lava occurred along the Wasatch, the laccoliths of the Henry Mountains were formed, while the great masses of igneous rock which constitute the cores of the Spanish Peaks and other western mountains were thrust up amid the strata. The high plateaus from which many of these ranges rise had not yet been uplifted, and the bases of the mountains probably stood near the level of the sea.
"No Mormon'll need another wife if he takes her," laughed somebody else. "She'll be promised to Dan'l 'fore ever we cross the Wasatch." And they all in the group looked slyly at me. "Acts as if she'd been sealed to him already, he does."
Then comes Castle Valley, to describe which is to beggar language and pall imagination. On the north is the Tavaputs; on the west is the Wasatch Plateau, which lies to the south of the Wasatch Mountains and is here the west boundary of the Plateau Province; on the south are indescribable mesas and mountains; on the east is Grand River, a placid stream meandering through a valley of meadows.
Its topmost springs are far north and east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River, Front, Park, and Sawatch ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and the Elk, Wasatch, Uinta, and innumerable spurs streaked with streams, made famous by early explorers and hunters.
The Uinta Mountains are carved out of the great plateau which extends more than two hundred miles to the eastward of the summit of the Wasatch Range. Its mountain peaks are cameos, its upper valleys are meadows, its higher slopes are forest groves, and its streams run in deep, solemn, and majestic canyons.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking