Wonderstone and Utah's Soft Reopening! - The Bill Beaver Project

Salt Lake City, UT → Vernon, UT → Salt Lake City, UT
162.0 mi (260.7 km)

Wonderful news, everyone!

Today, many of Utah’s state parks are reopening to visitors, so long as they maintain social distancing and other common sense measures! I was keen to support some local history, and Flatty had some ideas. We headed out early to visit a neat spot known as Camp Floyd!

Not much of Camp Floyd has survived to today, but in 1858, it was the largest military post in the United States! It was a federal outpost designed to put down a Mormon rebellion that never happened, and it was only around for three years, when the Civil War reprioritized everyone’s mission! Today, the Commissary is the only remaining building from the military post!

Though the park has reopened, it still has warning signs about COVID-19 built into its bulletin boards. Last Sunday, there were 3,069 cases in Utah, and today, there are 3,948, which might indicate some slowing! In the same time back in Los Angeles County, the count has grown from 12,341 to 19,107! I think I’ll stay here in Utah a little longer.

Beyond the existential threats, this park’s main attraction is the Stagecoach Inn, built the same year as Camp Floyd by John Carson! It served folks traveling the Pony Express and Central Overland Trail!

Inside, there are still plenty of beds, as well as a chair with a chamber pot built into it and a bullet hole through two walls where a guest accidentally fired while cleaning his gun! Though the owners didn’t allow alcohol in the inn, it stayed popular enough to outlast the Pony Express and Camp Floyd, serving travelers between Utah and Nevada until 1947!

After touring the Stagecoach Inn, we headed further southwest down the old Pony Express Trail into Tooele County. There are markers set up, like this one in Faust, which line the path that these adventurers took on their 10-day sprint from Missouri to California! Except for the heat of the summer, this must have been one of the more scenic stretches!

A bit further, and after some wrong turns down dirt roads, we reached our destination: the wonderstone quarry!

Wonderstone is really neat! It’s made up of tons of pieces of volcanic glass welded together by heat and crushed to serious hardness by underground pressure! Along the way, iron oxide mixes in, creating some amazing red, white, and yellow stripes!

We sure weren’t alone in our quest for wonderstone. This was definitely a weekend for folks to leave their quarantines behind and escape to the hills. No matter, though, my old philosophy of “Get high” applied. The higher we climbed on the hill out of the main quarry, the better the specimens and the views got! Look at our haul!

I’m excited to bring these wonderstones home and put them in my garden, but I still don’t know when the best time will be to make my return trip. It’s really been frustrating having to put my national park quest on hold for so long, but I am very glad to be spending this time with my family. I hope you’re also hanging in there!

See you down the trail!!