Road Trip: The Built Environment

While most of the trip was about the natural environment, I was delighted by and sought out plenty of human-built structures. Some of them were falling down candidates for Decay & Desuetude, but here are some other things that struck my fancy.

I loved stumbling upon the Ephraim, UT library, and discovering that it was a Carnegie library, built in 1914. It has great fenestration.

We were fascinated by the free damn tour of the Flaming Gorge hydroelectric dam (the tour guide used damn/dam as often as she could). Dedicated in 1964, it's an amazing piece of concrete work, though we can debate the pros and cons of a hydro dam from now 'til eternity.

I also liked the old-school dam on Jackson Lake. Gears!

Because we were in Utah, some of the sights were Mormon sites, like the temple in Salt Lake City.

And the Ephraim Co-op building, built in 1871 of local oolite limestone.

And another LDS temple, with the helpfully named Temple View motel right near by.

We also stopped to check out a fracking well, which had cows grazing alongside. The cows ran away when we got out of the car.

At the four corners of the main square in the center of Jackson, WY, there are huge arches made of antlers. I like the pattern. And this totally counts as "built environment" - you can see a screw head just off center.

The old Old Faithful Lodge is a wonderful pile, inside and out.

This hinge is on a side door at the Norris Geyser Basin Museum.

We made an art pilgrimage to the Spiral Jetty which meant 34 miles of gravel road in the middle of nowhere. (And the kid refused to get out of the car when we got there.)

I love that fans have built tiny spirals alongside the big one. (You can see them to the left of the base of the spiral in the picture above.

Actually, I'm not surprised that the girl didn't get of of the car, because we were driving the hut, and the hut didn't love the gravel road AT ALL. In fact, I was expecting a mutiny from both my husband and my child, but he decided to embrace the adventure when he realized that there was no turning back.

A sea of cuboid hay is a perhaps a stretch as far as the "built environment" is concerned, but it compelled me to take its picture, so here it is. Anyway, it's totally man-made.

And because I'm weird, I had to take a picture of a concrete light pole, in a suburban part of Salt Lake City. I just liked it.

---

Part 1, The Hut, is here.
Part 2, The Campsites, is here.
Part 3, On Food And Cooking, is here.
Part 4, The Assignment, is here.
Part 5, The Animals, is here.
Part 6, The Natural Sights, is here.