Museum of Natural History

Saturday
This morning we woke up to snow and heavy skies - you can usually see the mountains above the rooftops from Jen and Jason’s house, but they were totally encased in cloud today. While there was just 1-2 inches in the city, they were forecasting over a foot up at the ski resorts - which I’m sure they were very happy about, as last year was not a good year for snow in the SLC area. After a delicious breakfast - breakfasts generally being prepared by Jen, as Jason is not a morning person (!) - Jen suggested we visited the Museum of Natural History.
The museum is nestled into the foothills of the Wasatch Mountain Range, and is built on a series of terraces that follow the contours of the hillside, blending into the environment. It is quite a striking building due to the band of standing seam copper that wraps the exterior of the building.  The copper, mined from the Bingham Canyon Mine located across the Salt Lake Valley from the museum site, is installed in horizontal bands of various heights to represent the layered rock formations seen throughout Utah. Inside, the architecture is just as striking, with huge windows letting in lots of light and affording sweeping views over the valley.
We took one of their Highlights tours, led by one of their volunteer docents, which turned out to be excellent. The guide was very knowledgeable, and made everything very interesting, from the Native American exhibits to to geology and flora and fauna of the Great Lake and their wonderful dinosaur exhibit. Utah is an absolute Mecca for paleontologists, and they’re constantly finding new bones and skeletons, and discovering new species - our guide pointed out a couple of skeletons named after museum staff who were involved in the digs. She even took us into one of the labs, where volunteers were working on piecing the bones together- talk about a complex jigsaw puzzle! The museum also had a special exhibit on the Maya which we explored, and then spent some time looking at displays in more detail on our own. We ended up spending most of the day there, and could have spent longer.
When we left, we still had about 45 minutes until the sunset, so we went for a walk along the adjacent Bonneville Shoreline trail, a pathway on the west slopes of the Wasatch Range and the east slopes of the Oquirrh Range, on or near the shoreline bench of the ancient glacial Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville was a prehistoric lake that covered much of the eastern part of the Great Basin region. Most of the territory it covered was in present-day Utah, though parts of the lake extended into present-day Idaho and Nevada. Lake Bonneville existed until about 14,500 years ago, when a large portion of the lake was released through the Red Rock Pass in Idaho. The lake was nearly as extensive as Lake Michigan, and significantly deeper. After the release, and with the change in climate, the lake began drying up, leaving the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake to the south, and other lakes as remnants. My pictures of the exterior of the museum were taken at this time as the setting sun peaked out between layers of cloud.