9/3 - Salt Lake City's Natural History Museum

Where we're staying is 30 to 40 miles north of Salt Lake City, depending on destination. Being Saturday the traffic wasn't too heavy but it was still very fast. Traveling unfamiliar urban interstates at 70 mph is dicey because things happen so fast. We managed to get off track when our road split with no notice and not enough time to adjust. We relied on Eloise (our GPS) to figure it out which she did. No harm done except for jangled nerves.

Our destination today was the Natural History Museum of Utah which is part of the University of Utah. The section of campus we drove through to get there was beautiful and very big. The museum itself is extremely impressive.

The museum is in the Rio Tinto Center which is sheathed with 42,000 square feet (100,000 pounds) of native Utah copper mined and donated by Kennecott Utah Copper, part of the global mining corporation Rio Tinto. The solid copper and copper-zinc alloy panels are weathering naturally in various shades of brown and green and gray.

The copper was mined at Kennecott's Bingham Canyon Mine, 22 miles to the west across the Great Salt Lake where it is visible from the museum on clear days (which today wasn't). This mine is remarkable in that it has been in continuous operation since 1890 and has produced more copper than any other mine in U.S. history.

The interior of the building is outstanding. These multi-story windows on the front overlook the city and mountains beyond.

 A four-story display of the art of Utah's Native Americans which can be seen from both sides.

The view across the city from an upper floor deck is beautiful in spite of the air pollution which is lying like a blanket across the northern end to the right. Salt Lake City has the same kind of pollution problem as Asheville. Both cities get temperature inversions which trap pollution and prevent it from moving out until the inversion changes.

The building has many interesting green features, one being a green roof which insulates, provides habitat for birds and insects, filters water and air, and absorbs heat. Water not used by the plants drains into underground cisterns and is used in the irrigation system for the landscaping. Another great feature is the porous parking lot surface which traps pollutants but allows water to go through to the soil below instead of running into the city's storm water system.

There are numerous galleries covering everything to do with Utah's natural history from Native Americans to geology and even genome mapping and medical science's advances. 

The only pictures I took in the galleries were of the dinosaurs of which Utah has an astounding number. The display is outstanding.

The horned dinosaur skull collection. For those of us who went to school when the triceratops was the only horned dinosaur, this is quite a surprise. Paleontology has made tremendous strides in the past 50 years.

This Hagryphus is especially interesting because he has skeletal eyeballs and a crest. He really doesn't need to be fleshed out to have character.

A Utahceratops, one of the horned dinos. The one in the back with the tree-sized neck is so big he wouldn't fit in one picture.  It's a sauropod whose name I didn't get, not that it matters. He's one of the type that ate the tops of trees with all four feet on the ground.

I thought we'd spend a few hours at the museum and still have time to visit the Red Butte Botanical Gardens next door, but we were there for six hours and had to rush through the last galleries because they were closing. (That six hours did include lunch in their cafe.) We could have easily spent several more hours in there. It's the best natural history museum we've ever been to.