Ensign Peak and the City of Salt Lake

Sloppy Sophia looking like the real deal while cutting tread for a trail.

We got a taste of trailwork before we again succumbed to the curse of the SLC City Council.  The project fell apart and we got banished to a third week in the dog park.  Oh well, I got a view of Salt Lake City from above.  Mormon pioneers who came from the East (left on the picture below) at what is now This is the Place State Park climbed Ensign Peak to survey the headquarters of the empire that they would create in this newfound region that they called Zion.

The City of Salt Lake from the peak where it was planned.

The Wasatch front along the Salt Lake City metro area

While in and around Salt Lake for the week, I had a chance to spend an hour downtown.  I walked through Temple Square on my way to the Family History Museum.  I found two of the vaunted sister missionaries (many girls who do missions get sent to Salt Lake to be present around the LDS headquarters.  Interestingly, young men generally do not, as far as I know, get sent to Salt Lake.  That, to me, is indicative of some bizarre gender norms, or worse.  But that is the Church's trip, not mine.)  I wanted to forever remember SLC bizarro, so I asked my two new friends, one from Malaysia and one from Singapore to take a picture with me.  Being obligate helpful souls, I gave a third an opportunity to help me out by clicking the shutter.

Two sister missionaries, Sophia and I in Temple Square.  They are obligated to be happy and nice.  It is their mission.

In the Family History Museum I found that my great great great great grandfather William Coe Critchlow moved his wife Harriett and children William Fuller, Benjamin Chamberlain and Scharlot out west to the Ogden/Brigham City area north of Salt Lake in the 1850s to farm.  They were Mormons from Pennsylvania.  William Fuller married Mary Eliza who gave birth to William J in 1868.  William J would meet a very special Anna C (she was Danish) who would give birth to my great grandfather Victor David Critchlow in Ogden in that fateful November of 1898.  Victor David's brother, William J Jr. would go on to become a high priest, stake president and general authority within the Church of Latter Day Saints.  Victor David divorced my great grandmother Jesse and was largely absent from the lives of the subsequent line of the Critchlow clan except for one occasion when he showed up to a family barbecue and happened to drop dead in the backyard, or at least that's how my own father describes the imprint on his ten-year-old brain.

In any case, I am not Mormon, and after that tragic exit and dramatic encore in the lives of us non-LDS Critchlows, I will remain dubious towards a comeback by the Mormon church in my family.  As far as I know, there are still Mormon Critchlows in the Ogden area.