Day 4 -- Springville to Green River, Utah -- 132 Miles

Today, there being few attractions on our intended route save miles and miles of magnificent sandstone canyon bottoms encompassing Utah's Soldier Creek, as well as the White and Price rivers, we mostly drove and listened to our book on DVD. Alongside these streams ran a twin set of railroad tracks belonging to the Union Pacific which we watched for any oncoming trains which might break the sameness of the scenery. The geology was sort of monochromatic but wonderful and which seemed to be arranged in alternate layers of sand and rock running for mile upon mile.

Still, for me, the drive felt like coming "home" again. While last night's camp was located in the town where my mother's grandmother lived most of her life, mostly in the farm country an hour's drive south of Salt Lake City. Today our goal was to sojourn through the country where my mother's mother and her husband, my grandfather, lived and worked before they moved to California in the 1930s.

When I said "home" for me, I meant that when I was a boy my mother was enthralled with visiting Utah where her father and mother first lived and worked and raised their family. Mom's dad worked for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, as a bridge builder if I remember correctly. Her mother was a homemaker since she had six kids to raise by 1920, though in the early years of their marriage I remember that my grandmother ran a boardinghouse in the Railroad town of Colton.

In the early 1960s my family spent vacations exploring all the places her parents had lived and worked near Price, Utah. I think it's the experience that kick-started my love of history and exploration that eventually became a lifelong passion. As a family, we prowled all the cemeteries where distant relatives might be found, then visited with their living sons and daughters if still in the area. One-by-one we sought out and photographed each and every place my mother's parents had lived. In those days I was only twelve or thirteen, but I was most often the family photographer, and Utah felt like my home away from home we visited so often.

We went to Colton, and I photographed the school where some of my aunts and uncles attended as children. It was just a shell of its former self if memory serves, and the rest of the town was completely gone. We couldn't even find where grandmother's boarding house had stood. It's always sad to see how often the magnificent works born of our ancestors' hard work and sweat are lost to history.

In those days we would drive west then south on Utah Route 96 to find the little mining town where my grandparents were living when my mother was born one blizzard-filled night in March 1924. I think Mom said that the doctor had a really difficult time coming to the house because of all the snow, but come he did. The town there was called Clear Creek, though I don't know exactly why. Looking up the still existing tiny village today on the map I discovered that it sits along a meandering stream known as "Mud Creek." Maybe the town's forefathers just thought it would be funny.

Visiting Clear Creek was always poignant for my mom since the brother closest to her in age died very young and is buried in the area. I no longer remember how the brother died, but he was the only one of her siblings who did not live a long life. I took pictures of brother Jackie's grave for Mom as I remember it and photos made her very happy. I'm not sure exactly what was mined in Clear Creek, though it might have been coal.

One of our topics of discussion today, as we rode along enjoying the scenery in the canyon, is how railroads work. Not many casual observers know that trains keep from running into other trains by observing the "block signals" along the right-of-way. The block signals are the tall stanchions displaying red, yellow, or green lights. If you're driving alongside a rail line and see one of those stanchions displaying a red light, that means that a train, which might be going either direction, will be in the next "block" on your line of travel. In case you're wondering, I found that a block is customarily as long as the longest trains being run over that line, or a little longer.

If the engineer sees a yellow light he knows that another train is two blocks away and he should proceed with caution. If the light is green, the engineer is free to proceed at whatever speed is allowed on that stretch of track. Of course, nowadays train control folks, in front of a computer somewhere, pretty much know where every train is located and can electronically route some trains onto sidings in order for other trains with a greater priority to pass.

We also discussed the town we passed in the canyon with the unusual name of "Helper." Few would guess that the town received its name for the crucial roll it has always played in helping trains travel up the same canyon that we spent the day descending. As you might guess, even in the days of steam engines, trains were most often pulled by one or two locomotives as they transported their string of cars across the largely flat areas of America. But in mountainous regions, those one or two locomotives would struggle and even fail to "make the grade." So, railroads always needed a spot at the foot of long uphill stretches where they could store extra motive power to be used when needed. This extra motive power was always known as a "helper engine."

Nowadays, as trains are being pulled by truly massive and powerful diesel electric engines, those same helper engines are still employed and are most often located at the rear of the train, which makes it easier for the helper to detach when help is no longer needed. Today Concetta and I stopped at a roadside rest to stretch our legs a bit and just at that juncture a train came chugging up the canyon just upslope from us. And sure enough, the front end of a long line of hoppper cars sported two diesel electric locomotives and at the tail end, running as helpers, came two more. What's really great is that those four locomotives can all be controled by one guy in the lead engine.

I guess that's enough rail talk for now, but it's a topic with which I've been fascinated since my brother and I would walk a couple of blocks to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad near our Aunt Margaret's house to put pennies on the rails in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Our plan today was to not stop in Green River, but to travel on to Moab before camping. But by chance Concetta stumbled over an internet discussion of the great museum here in Green River dedicated to John Wesley Powel, the one-armed guy who first succeeded in exporing the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. After reading about how wonderful prior visitors had found the museum, we decided to find a camp here in Green River and stay until the museum opened tomorrow morning. It was unfortunately closed today.

We also learned that a KOA camp lay just across the road from the museum which sounded ideal. However, when we drove into the camp and checked with the registration office, we learned that the KOA had no vacancies. Asking the clerk to call me if anyone cancelled for the night, we next drove down the road to another camp. As fate would have it, not only did we get a nice spot in the second camp, but while registering my cell phone rang. Turned out that the previous camp was calling to offer a space that had just been cancelled. We went ahead and declined the kind phone offer with thanks, and we stayed in the second camp.

So here we are in Green River, esconced in a nice clean campsite with a concrete patio, and all is right with the world. Tomorrow we'll visit a museum that we have not seen before, and then head on down the road in the direction of Moab and, eventually, southern Colorado. Until then, I wish you a good evening and happy travels of your own.