Tag Archives: Westbound 2022

Swedes Across America

2022-05-31

I stopped at the Lincoln Monument a few miles east of Laramie, and highest point on I-80/US-30. The visitor center there has a lot of information about the Lincoln Highway. It gives all the credit for the Lincoln Highway to Henry Joy, the president of Packard Motor Company and the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association. There is no mention of Carl Fisher, the man who originally conceived the idea. Curious oversight.

While there I met Henrik Bjorklund, a Swede who with 5 others is driving his 1959 Chrysler Imperial from Florida to Alaska, then ferrying from Alaska to Seattle and driving to LA. The cars in the tour are all Detroit chrome and iron before 1961. These cars are beautiful and immaculately restored. Henrik told me that they found the cars in the US, shipped them to Sweden, restored them and shipped them back for these tours.

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Ron’s Summer 2022 Begins

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Lincoln Highway Marker

I leave in the next few days for another 3-4 month trip into the great west. The only thing I know about this trip so far is I will follow the Lincoln Highway west from Iowa. If you want to follow along, there is an interactive map and a lot of information at the Lincoln Highway Association.

The Lincoln Highway was the first coast-to-coast route that started in Times Square and ended in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, passing through 14 states on the way.

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Moab on the Colorado

2022-05-22

I camped by the Colorado River in the Red Rocks Gorge north of Moab.1

The gorge is not as deep as some of other canyons, but the cliffs on both sides are nearly vertical through all of the 15 mile drive. You can’t get a feel of the size in the photographs. There are a couple of places along highway 128 where the cliffs overhang the highway. The downside of being at the bottom of a 2,000 foot canyon is that there is no cell service of any kind.

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  1. I wish I could remember all the times I have camped by the Colorado. The two I do remember are Needles California and Laughton Nevada. [↩]

THE Railroad Town

2022-05-24

North Platte Nebraska is THE railroad town. It was created by Missouri Pacific, and the railroad still dominates the city. When Grenville Dodge was laying out the route for the first transcontinental railroad, he identified this location in central Nebraska as the ideal location for a routing, service and maintenance facility – the midpoint between Salt Lake and Omaha with plenty of land and water. When the track-layers reached the location, they built multiple tracks, sidings, work buildings and housing for the yard. The railroad brought over 100 workers to man it all. The place did not have a name, but soon acquired the moniker “Hell on Wheels”. It was established as North Platte in 1866 and became the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad in 1867 until the railroad was extended to Laramie.

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Farewell Bend

About May 22, 1843 one-thousand people left Kansas City toward new lives in the Oregon Country. Over the next 20 years more than 50,000 people would emigrate to a land considered the “Garden of the World.” Much of the journey was across the dry high plains of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Near what is now Burley, Utah they came to the fresh water and good grazing of the Snake River, and would generally follow it for the next 300 miles.

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