53. The Wasatch Mountains

            I know my entries have made it overly obvious that I love the mountains. I live in the mountains and I am intrigued by the mountains.  One range that I really love extends from the lower part of Utah into southeastern Idaho and is best known as the Wasatch Range. But in Idaho the same range is commonly referred to as the Bear River Range.  That’s also the part of the range with which I am more familiar, though certainly I’ve been through Utah.  And lots of people are familiar with the range if they’ve ever flown into Salt Lake City and seen the mountain backdrop. That’s it, the Wasatch Range. It’s a destination ski resort in Park City and the range hosted the Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games of 2002. 

For me it is by far the driest mountain range I have ever lived in or near (and I did live there for six years as a teacher in southeastern Idaho).  It’s still part of the great Rocky Mountain Range, and it gets the weather pattern with which I am familiar. So winter is snowy and cold and summer is hot and dry.

The valleys are all sage brush desert and part of the Great Basin.  The hillsides are covered in juniper and maple so that autumn is brilliant with color in every draw and canyon.  When you go a little higher you’ll find aspen groves (some of the largest in the world) and blue spruce, Douglas fir and white fir and pine.  I’ve never been real comfortable in desert but I loved being able to take a short drive into the hills and get into what they call the Canadian life zone and feel right at home.  I also found huckleberry patches that were pretty much all mine because no one there seemed all that familiar with them.  And the mountains there have plenty of wildlife including moose which I had always associated with more northern climes. They thrive in the little reservoirs formed by the many beaver dams.

The Wasatch/Bear River mountains are a beautiful American Gem in a dry and barren land and I am especially grateful for those mountains.