Salt Lake City Cemetery

Here are some photos from my trip to Salt Lake City. My folks have lived there about 15 years, so I've seen and done a lot of the usual touristy stuff before. My sis took me to visit the SLC Cemetery, which is enormous and very lovely in winter. She told me ghost stories about visiting with friends in the dead of night, finding an urn that is always warm even in winter, and a mysterious force that pushes people off the top of a particular crypt. We visited on a quiet, unremarkable day and saw nothing mysterious.

A lovely headstone with what looks to be Arabic and Hebrew writing on it. I've never seen anything quite like this before.

A stone monument that looked like an AT-AT from afar.

View of graveyard with mountains in the background.

A broken tombstone is balanced atop another.

So I might have recently watched Star Trek and have limited reverence for the dead.

Gilgal Sculpture Garden

I visited family in Salt Lake City, Utah, for Christmas, and at the recommendation of an acquaintance, my sister took me to visit the Gilgal Sculpture Garden, a park created by Thomas Battersby Child, Jr., in the mid-twentieth century. From Wikipedia: he "conceived of a symbolic sculpture garden that would be a retreat from the world and a tribute to his most cherished religious and personal beliefs."

It's a wacky little spot featuring "12 original sculptures and over 70 stones engraved with scriptures, poems, and literary texts." It had snowed that week, and the fresh snow was pristine when we arrived. There were no signs telling us not to climb up on the rocks to take pictures, so we did.

(A phoenix with the face of LDS leader Joseph Smith)

(A close-up shot of Joe's great, hooked nose)

(Me with two sculpted hands framing two sculpted hearts in a rocky alcove)

(Me with a plow with swords and other farming implements welded to it)

(Me alongside an obelisk with a faintly visible wire man atop it)

(The stone back of one piece)

(Additional stonework I cannot identify)

So if you're looking for something odd to do in SLC for a half hour, check it out. It doesn't look like the place gets very much traffic.