Ghost Town Trash Dumps

My wife and I went out last weekend, roaming the north west of Utah in search of various ghost towns. This is the region in and around where the Golden Spike was driven, on the completion of the first intercontinental railway. The expedition was more for the plain fun of it, rather than anything serious, with the goal of having something to waste memory card space with by our digital cameras. A couple of Websites we visited talked of various buildings which could still be found, etc.

I was hoping to see a crumbling building or two, but our search for structures ended up being quite a disappointment. We only found one partially standing structure, in five towns searched - a collapsing fruit cellar.

It would appear that among the many hobbies of the resident Utards, destroying ghost towns is among them. I can’t blame outside tourists, because no one in their right mind from out of state would travel these dusty, barely maintained, mostly unmarked gravel roads, with only a handful of gunshot wounded road signs along the way. Some of the passages we took were pretty challenging, with most resorting to ATV’s to traverse them, rather than a 4×4 like we use.

A couple of piles of brick. One intact trestle. Some pottery shards. A few railroad ties. That’s all we found in roughly 400 miles of travel. Oh, I forgot to mention the piles of discarded modern beer cans, bottles and various trash, which amounted to more mass than the remnants of the towns themselves - their numbers would require scientific notation for manageable summation. Apparently the husks of dead alcohol containers are the only spirits of these once thriving little towns.

In spite of this, we did have a very good time just being out and about and our dog, Kipling, was excited most of the way. He’s a Yorkshire Terrier, but we refer to him as a “2x Yorkie”, as he’s no tea cup variety at 15 pounds and similar length in inches. (We knew he wasn’t a “show quality” dog when we got him, which was just fine by us.) He’s a smart little dog as well. Perhaps too smart at times, as he tries to circumvent the rules any chance he thinks he can get away with. The picture here is of his smiling mug, hanging off his car seat before we took to the trail again.

In any case, the trip itself was fun for the sense of exploration, with the highlight being the discovery of a coyote den under a trestle. Bones littered the surrounding ground, telling the menu of rodents, antelope and other unknown mammals.

Hopefully we’ll find more remote areas in our next search, which haven’t been ravaged by morons with sophomoric, destructive agendas.