Day 1 - Great Basin Museum

 We were off on vacation last week, and what a wonderful week it was! I'm going to try and squeeze in lots of posts so that our blog book is fairly complete. (Once a year I print the entire blog, and it is such a nice way to keep track of what we did that year.)

Our trip started with driving over the railroad bridge in Delta, UT and seeing the smoke from the nearby mountains fill the sky. This was the Clay Springs Fire, which required the evacuation of nearby Oak City for a night. It's grown to over 108,000 acres. Yikes! Many years, fewer than 100,000 acres burn in the Great Basin. Now just one fire has topped that. The fire costs $4.5 million to date.

 We couldn't do anything about the fire, so we headed to the Great Basin Museum, which opened at its new location on main street in late May.

 They have a lot more exhibit space, and the kids were happy to get out and take a look.


What caught Desert Boy's attention was a model train on the side. It turned out that this model train showed a replica of the roundhouse at Lynndyl, which is located a bit north of Delta. We had never known that there was a roundhouse there.

 It turns out sleepy Lynndyl used to be not-so-sleepy. It was the biggest Union Pacific terminal between Omaha, Nebraska and Los Angeles. The original Lynndyl Roundhouse was 8 stalls, and this was enlarged to 19 stalls about 1920.

They had an aerial image of the roundhouse, which looked amazing, so I decided we would look for it on Google Earth when we got home. Here's what we found:

Do you see the roundhouse outline? Desert Boy and I think it's so cool! We hope to take a trip out there some time. It's so exciting learning something new about the area, especially something about trains.

 We also took a look at some old furnishings.

 This chemistry set caught my eye. We still have a couple of these hanging around the ranch.

 The trilobite collection was extensive, as one of the world's best places for collecting trilobites is only about 30 miles from Delta.

 The glowing rocks were a huge hit with the kids.

Grant helped Desert Boy with the old switchboard.

We're going to have to go back to take more time to look at everything. I'm really glad they were able to move the museum to main street, as they should have lots more traffic now. So if you're in the area, take some time to see the Great Basin Museum!