Weird day trips from Salt Lake City
The strangest Salt Lake City finds are often a short drive out. These 12 day trips — Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.
-
Spiral Jetty
In 1970 Robert Smithson bulldozed 6,500 tons of black basalt into a 1,500-foot counterclockwise coil jutting…
-
Sun Tunnels
Nancy Holt sank four 18-foot-long, 9-foot-diameter concrete culverts into open desert in 1976 and drilled hol…
-
Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum
A free, accredited university natural-history museum whose quiet headline exhibit is Shasta — a taxidermied l…
-
Ott Planetarium & Public Observatory
One floor below a 30-foot, 60-seat full-dome theater sits a rooftop observatory with nine 'point-and-go' tele…
-
Union Station (Ogden)
In 1927 the station built an actual pedestrian subway under all eleven tracks so passengers didn't have to cr…
-
John Hutchings Museum of Natural History
Amid rock and mineral cases, Native American pottery, and a pistol said to have belonged to Butch Cassidy sit…
-
Dream Mine
Founded in 1894 by John Hyrum Koyle after a series of prophetic dreams, this unproductive gold mine was inten…
-
Central Standard Mine
Sunk in the early 1920s within the East Tintic Mining District, the Central Standard Mine was a gold, silver,…
-
Grand Central Mine
The Grand Central Mine is a historic gold and silver mine situated on the steep slopes of Eureka Peak in the…
-
Old Mayflower Mine
The Old Mayflower Mine is an abandoned lead and zinc mine located in the upper reaches of West Canyon in Utah…
-
Ben Harrison Mine Shaft
The Ben Harrison Mine (also known as the New Stockton Mine) is a historic lead, silver, gold, and copper mine…
-
Dry Lake Antimony Mine
The Dry Lake Antimony Mine is an inactive late-19th-century mine located in Antimony Canyon on the steep west…