Sunday, May 26, 2013

Where is Salt Lake is This?

Melinda and I are taking a class through the University of Utah that I've wanted to take for a long time.  It's called "Off the Couch" and it's a walking tour of Salt Lake that begins in a different location each week.

Before the class began, we tried to guess the average age of our fellow participants.  My guess was 50 because it involves moderate to brisk walking.  Melinda said 67.  Turns out the average age is much younger!  There is a person about our age taking the class with her parents, a teenage girl and her Russian mom, an elderly Australian woman, a young married couple, and an attractive gay couple about our age. A diverse group.

I thought it might be fun to do a little re-cap of each session.  Here's the description for this week's class:
Meet in the parking lot of the Post Office on corner of Arapeen and 2255 Sunnyside Ave to discover ghosts, a graveyard and a bone yard.

Here are my pics:









If you guessed This is the Place State Park, you're right!  (You can see the monument through the clearing there)

  • The ghosts: the Brigham Young home that sits inside the park is original and supposedly (according to Google) one of the most haunted sites in Utah. 
  • The boneyard: The site was used as a "boneyard" for granite pieces that were too small or oddly shaped to be used for the Salt Lake temple.  You can see the granite in many of the paths and walkways in the park.
  • The graveyard: When they were building the Gateway, they found the graves of about 32 pioneer children, and had them re-buried up at This is the Place.  There's a small little cemetery there.  

One of the comments we heard from other class members was, "I don't know how many times I've driven past this, and I had no idea all this was back here."

Plus, we got to see this: they have a quilt museum onsite, and this is an actual quilt made in 1918, made from....?


Dead Squirrels. 


(If I had to see this, so do you). 



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