![]() ![]() FrontRunner, the Utah Transit Authority’s commuter rail service, runs through here on its way south to Provo and north to Ogden. On a bright morning a few days before the Golden Spike celebration, we left our house and rode a few miles to Salt Lake City’s North Temple Station. ![]() It made sense to begin our journey on a train platform, albeit a modern one. As Corinne knows too well, the Golden Spike country of today straddles land both urban and empty, fertile and ruthlessly rugged. Confronted by the expanses of the Great Basin, Golden Spike reminds us that we have the same challenges today that were there at the beginning. Then, as now, our population occupies a thin strip of fertile land, with the growing question of how we can sustain it - to suspend the disbelief of a thriving civilization here.Īs we found, the clang of the Golden Spike resounds far throughout this corner of Utah, in a region still feeling the effects of the meeting of the rails. Now Promontory was within shouting distance of the expanding edge of a metro region predicted to grow to 5 million people by 2050. A remote spot had sent the Wasatch Front on a growth trajectory 150 years ago. It was also a trip into the past and future of Utah. But I didn’t know who this was, or what his job was. It showed a thoughtful-looking, white-goateed man sitting behind two bald Asian men, who, my mom said, were Chinese rail workers. An old photograph of him had hung in the hallway outside my bedroom. Juliet and I had family history here - beginning as a small child, I was told that one of my direct ancestors was part of the last spike ceremony. We had packed bikes and taken a train and bus from our house in Salt Lake to the northern reaches of the Wasatch Front, riding through the Bear River Valley, our ultimate destination the annual reenactment of the driving of the last spike at Promontory Summit. Indeed, we were on our way to that meeting place in the desert. ![]() From what I could gather, the town’s most prominent landmark was the giant golden spike in the roof of the restaurant, which, along with the restaurant’s name, was a nod to the much better-known attraction to the west, the Golden Spike National Historic Park, where the Transcontinental Railroad was linked a few weeks after the Hell on Wheels burned through Corinne. At the center of town was the popular Golden Spike Burgers, where my daughter Juliet and I had just finished off a meal she had a burger and I had a chile verde burrito. I stood there 149 years later, on a May afternoon. Corinne today is not a place most Utahns have heard of, let alone visited. But the city of the future was not destiny. ![]()
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