My first photo of the trip: these are the mountains to the east / southeast of campus, the southern end of the Wasatch Range. I was standing behind the residence hall that I stayed in when I took this. The dorm area is centered on a second student union called the Heritage Center. This area was part of Fort Douglas in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the current Fort is about a kilometer downhill. There is a nice virtual tour of the historic Fort area on the UU website that will give you a better idea of where things are located and how the old fort used to look.

This is Officers Circle, a quad in the dorm area right next to Stilwell Field, where the soldiers used to do their drills. There is an old-style bandstand / gazebo just out of frame to the left. I wish I had taken a picture with the bandstand in it, but here I was just trying to get a shot of the houses and the trees, with the round northern mountains in the background. Those hills seem very out of place to me next to all the rocky, bare mountains that surround the city on the other sides. The old officers' houses are now specially-themed student housing, like they have on many campuses (fine arts house, science house, that sort of thing).

The mountains a little more directly east, taken from near the Fort Douglas museum. The museum, Stilwell Field, and Officers Circle are all right next to each other. If you compare the mountains here to those in the first picture, you should be able to see where the two pictures would lead into each other, had they been taken from the same location.

Taken across Stilwell Field looking toward those round, green mountains to the north. It was getting on towards evening now, as you can tell from the low angle of the light.

A closer view of the SE mountains. At around this time I decided to try to locate an outdoor concert I could hear nearby.

A couple of the residence halls that were housing most of the conference attendees, with the nearest mountain to the northeast as background. I followed the music off in the direction of this red mountain. Unfortunately, I found that it was at a pay-to-enter venue just at the edge of campus, but since I was out already I decided to take a little walk and try to get some good pictures of the landscape as the sun continued to go down.

That red, NE mountain again, early into sunset and with a clearer view. Based on some sinage and the names of nearby establishments, I think this mountain might be called "Red Butte", but it's not clear. Red Butte may be something out of sight, further up in the mountains themselves. There is a Red Butte Resevoir up this general direction, but, this isn't really your canonical "butte" shape, so I'm not sure.

The northern mountains again, now with the light even lower and redder. The shadows do a wonderful job of bringing out the contours. At this point I had left campus heading southeast, where there are a lot of large office buildings.

The mountain which may or may not be Red Butte again, taken from the same office district SE of campus as the last one. After this picture I turned southwest and went down a street called Wakara Way along the edge of campus, with more office buildings and the university Mariott.

All the mountains which faced the sunset turned different colors. The round, northern hills went sort of gold, the northeast mountain turned a vibrant red, and the more distant southeast mountains looked purple (at least part of that is probably just blue haze building up over the longer line of sight).

Just to the right (south) and zoomed in further, here you can see snow in one of the high-altitude Wasatch valleys.

This shot looks west towards the sunset as I meandered south along the edge of campus on Wakara Way.

Taken the next night (Monday the 8th), this photo shows the western mountains on the other side of the valley. The sun set not too far to the right of the frame here. Note that at the right end of the mountains there is a very tall tower. I saw it when my plane was landing, and then noticed it again when I took this picture. This shot is wider than the others, as I had two overlapping shots and decided to stitch them together. The seam is pretty sloppy, but, it's still nice to get a wider view.

The following day when I was at the other end of campus, between sessions, I noticed the tower again and took a closer, daylight picture of it. I later learned from one my group's alumni who grew up just west of SLC that this is actually a smokestack belonging to the Kennecott Copper Mine. It is 370 meters tall! It's the tallest structure in Utah, and was made so enormous to try to keep its fumes from spreading down into the valley.

Probably the most interesting item at the Fort Douglas museum was this pair of boots which almost definitely belong(ed) to Saddam Hussein. When he was pulled out of his "spider-hole" by American troops, the soldiers there were apparently from Utah. After the excitement died down a couple of the soldiers found this pair of boots in the area, took them, and donated them to the Fort Douglas museum.

I took this on Wednesday the 10th, shortly before I laid down for the stargazing session mentioned above. I took this picture, as well as the panorama two nights earlier, from the south end of the Eccles Legacy Bridge, a large cable-stayed footbridge that goes over Wasatch Drive in the middle of campus. It offers one of the least-obstructed views of the valley from campus, as there are lots of trees all over the place which block your line of sight unless you get up above them. There was a lot of construction on campus, so I'm not positive, but I believe this is the same crane that stood just outside the Engineering / Mines Classroom Building where many of the conference sessions were held. If so, the crane was about half a mile away.

As you may be doing at this very moment, the first time I noticed this statue, "Ute Brave", just out back of the main student union I thought... "What is he DOING...?" It's such a bizarre pose... turns out, he's got a bow in his right hand (which you can sort of see) and is reaching behind his back to pull an arrow from his quiver. And... is also reclining on a pointy rock with his legs spread apart. I dunno, even after figuring out what he's doing it still looks weirdly sexual to me. He looks just as strange from the other side, in my opinion, but maybe I just have a repressed attraction to bronze Indians.