Utah

15 places with something worth saying about them.

• Aragonite Hazardous Waste Incinerator A mining town that lasted only a few years left open shafts and an abandoned truck in the desert, and Utah's first hazardous waste incinerator went up right next door.
• Bonneville Speedway The salt at Bonneville was three feet deep in the nineteen forties. By 2015 it was two inches.
• Empress Theatre (Magna, Utah) A copper-mining town's 1916 movie house is run today by more than three hundred volunteers, and it's the only building in Magna on the National Register.
• FamilySearch Library A free library in downtown Salt Lake City holds more than two million rolls of microfilmed records from over a hundred countries.
• Fort Bridger A rider carrying letters found the Donner Party on the trail, promising a better road to California and a guide waiting at Fort Bridger.
• Fort Douglas A German warship crew stranded at Guam in 1914 ended up imprisoned in the foothills above Salt Lake City.
• Grass Creek, Utah A Utah coal camp of fewer than two hundred people had its own Chinatown, and a railroad with three rails.
• Joe Quinney Winter Sports Center This museum spent the 2002 Winter Olympics as an office for officials and reporters, with nothing on display inside it.
• Lake Point, Utah The famous bison herd on Antelope Island started as seventeen animals left over from a failed real estate scheme at Lake Point.
• Rock Springs massacre At least twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed here in a single afternoon, and no one was ever prosecuted.
• The Palisades (Green River, Wyoming) A rockfall here never touched the interstate, but it still shut it down.
• Wahsatch, Utah In one spring, this abandoned railroad camp sheared seven hundred thousand pounds of wool.
• Wendover Air Force Base The crews who dropped the atomic bombs learned their job at a desert airfield code-named Kingman, next to a town of about a hundred people.
• Wilkins Peak A propane truck with failed brakes rolled into a public radio tower on Wilkins Peak and knocked it flat.
• Wyoming State Hospital For decades, every new wing at Wyoming's state hospital was named after one of the state's counties.