Brigham's Utah

The Great Salt Lake 15,000 years ago, before any humans are known to have inhabited the area, Lake Bonneville covers some 32,000 square miles from its northern tip in Southern Idaho to its southern tip in Southern Utah, and its western extremity in Eastern Nevada to its eastern extremity in Central Utah.  At its maximum depth, it is over 980 feet deep.  The climate is cool and wet, and the valleys in Utah west of Wasatch Mountains are submerged deep under the lake.  After recent lava flows have diverted the flow of rivers in Southeastern Idaho into the lake, Bonneville's levels rise even higher, seeping through the barrier at the Portneuf and Bannock Mountains.  At first the leaking is gradual, until suddenly one day, the barrier is broken.  The massive power of Lake Bonneville is unleashed at 33 million cubic feet per second in a 410-foot wave, blasting through the Snake River Plain at 70 miles per hour and reshaping the land.  The 600-foot Snake Rive...

Medieval Castles in Utah Utah, 13th Century A.D. At an unknown date, sometime between A.D. 1200 and 1300 (according to the National Park Service), during what is called the Pueblo III Period, the Ancestral Pueblo people (also known as "Anasazi") were constructing multi-story stone towers that still stand to this day in the Four Corners area.  Their culture in the area dated back to the around 500 A.D., but around 1100, their communities transitioned from mesa tops to canyons.  One cluster of villages comprising about 2,500 people, now called "Hovenweep" (from a Paiute/Ute word meaning "deserted valley"), is built overlooking the canyons around the Cajon Mesa of the Great Sage Plain near the southern end of Utah's and Colorado's shared border.  The exact purpose of their brick structures is no longer known, whether they were homes, defensive structures, observatories or something else entirely.  Not all that long after, toward the end of the ...