After our brief stop for coffee and biscuits near Temple Square, we jumped on the Trax again and caught a different line out to the University area. We had been told we would be able to walk from a stop near the end of the line, called Fort Douglas, but in fact it proved to be rather a long walk.
At the start of the walk, we had to cross the very busy road on a footbridge, which gave a good view over the area.
The roofs on the right are those of the Trax station, and you can see the lines beside the road.
We had been given instructions to look for a gravel hiking trail, but we failed to find it and ended up walking through some of the University Halls of Residence and some of the original Fort Douglas buildings.
Fort Douglas was established to hold the soldiers who were quartered in the area to control the unruly Mormons! These old buildings we think must have been officers' quarters, around a pleasant green with a bandstand on it.
Nobody seemed able to direct us to the Museum, but fortunately it was marked on Apple Maps so we managed to find it. It was a very long walk though, perhaps a couple of miles or more and all uphill, and as the sun had come out, we were very hot.
When we eventually found the Museum, we discovered that the free Campus Shuttle bus can be caught to the Museum from the last Trax station on the line, which would have saved us a very long hot walk.
Unlike Museums in Britain, this one is not free, but it is really quite spectacular. How often do you get a view like this in a museum?
I was anxious to see the dinosaur bones and to take lots of photos for my older grandson; although his first love is Thomas the Tank Engine, he is also very fond of dinosaurs; they often seem to figure in his games with Thomas. I don't know if he has any concept of size, so I wanted to take lots of photos, preferably with Paul in them for a size comparison.
My first attempt was this replica dinosaur footprint.
That's my foot at the bottom of the picture - I wanted some sort of size comparison.
The dinosaurs are all very well displayed. This is one of my better photos, though sadly, I have forgotten to photograph its name.
I was particularly taken with this dinosaur version of a crocodile, though I didn't manage to get anybody in this photo for a size comparison.
My grandson is also very interested in crocodiles, though I think he would find this one quite frighteningly huge. Mind you, he has seen bits of the Disney film of Peter Pan, and can sing 'Never Smile at a Crocodile' so I suppose he must have a pretty fair idea of their size. The one above, however, is truly massive - it must be about 30 feet long.
As well as dinosaurs, there were bones of some ice age animals.
There's a mammoth in this photo, and a huge aurochs I think.
At that point, my camera battery ran out, so I didn't have the opportunity to photograph anything else. There were some very interesting artefacts though, human leavings dating back 10,000 years with a lot of stone axes and arrowheads. As people became more settled and less nomadic, they began to make more things and there was early pottery and some fascinating remains of early moccasins and sandals. The area round the Great Salt Lake had always attracted a lot of birds and hence other wildlife, so there were many resources for early hunters. The earliest sandals were made from the reeds that grow around the lake, and the moccasins from animal skins - usually with the fur inside! There were cloaks or blankets made from the reeds, and these showed traces of having been adorned with feathers as well.
There was quite a bit on geology, so we admired the many examples of gemstones that can be mined in the area, and a huge section on the formation of rocks. I spent some time studying the seismograph, since it was claimed that there is an earthquake somewhere every 11 seconds, but I saw nothing on the three sensors while I was there - though there was evidence of the seismograph needle having moved quite violently in the past.
By now we were quite exhausted, and even the snack we had eaten at the Museum café had failed to sustain us for long, so we went outside and caught the 3.30 Campus Shuttle back to the last Trax Station on the line - it's called Medical Center. We didn't have long to wait for the first train, and, although it was a different line from the one we had caught in the morning, it called at the station where we had boarded, so we didn't even have to change train. Even better, there was a bus waiting at the station which took us back to just outside our hotel, where we arrived just before 5pm, so we could make a start on our packing. We leave on the 9.15am airport shuttle
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