I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, Walking a road other men have gone down...*

My first stop today was Echo Canyon, Utah. This is Twain’s description of it and if highway 80 wasn’t in the middle of it I think it would have looked exactly the same!

Echo Canyon is twenty miles long. It was like a long, smooth, narrow street, with gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of course conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like medieval castles.

This picture does not do it justice.

When I exited the highway to get pictures of Echo Canyon, I stumbled across a Pony Express monument on the side of the road. It used to be the Weber Station for the riders of the Pony Express. The pony express was only in business about two years but Mark Twain managed to catch sight of a rider on his way to Utah. The rider he saw could have been going to Weber Station!

In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and watching for the "pony-rider"--the fleet messenger who sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do!

My final destination today was the Green River. In Roughing It, Twain makes the Green River seem close to Echo Canyon…it wasn’t! I drove two hours this morning looking for the town of Green River, Wyoming and it ended up being kind of neat little place.  Twain had breakfast at the Green River on the tenth day of his trip out west. I wanted to have breakfast there but too many mosquitoes were already having breakfast there, so sitting wasn't really an option.   

“The only decent meal we tasted between the United States and Great Salt Lake City, and only one we ever really thankful for”

On the Green River, I went to Expedition Island. Expedition Island marks the area where Major John Wesley Powell started an expedition down the Green River and Colorado River in 1871. His expeditions covered the last large land area in the continental United States left unexplored by European-Americans. It also had plaques noting other explorers who began their trek to the Grand Canyon here on the Green River.

While today was exhausting and I have a long day of driving tomorrow, it was really cool to physically see the places that Mark Twain talks about in Roughing It and because almost exactly 150 years ago Mark Twain was where I was today. He went through the Green River on August 4th and Echo Canyon on August 5th 1861.


 *Bob Dylan lyric not Twain