Editor's Note: For the next week, Lee Benson's office is his bicycle as he travels the byways and backways of northern Utah, looking for columns.
For this year's get-to-know-Utah (and get out of the office) bike trip, I decided I wanted to (1) Avoid 100-degree heat and (2) Leave for a change from my own front yard.
In three previous years' trips I have started out at various points in the southern part of the state, always in July. It's been beautiful, with a red rock tinge, but it's always been rather warm and the leaves have never been changing.
So this time I pulled out of Park City in mid-September, turned right at Chalk Creek and wound up in — Wyoming.
It's surprisingly easy to get to Wyoming without using the I-80 freeway. All I did was follow Chalk Creek Road out of Coalville for 24 miles and there it was: "Wyoming State Line." Which is how cowboys say "Welcome to Wyoming."
(Chalk Creek, incidentally, could be the best road bike ride in Utah. Here is the road less traveled. It's just you, your bike and beautiful farms and ranches perched postcard-like on rolling hills, with the occasional interruption of the silence by the singing of a meadowlark.)
The road did turn to gravel and dirt when Utah turned into Wyoming, which I thought was appropriate, given the rugged nature of the Cowboy State, but that only lasted for six miles, at which point pavement reappeared.
Another 18 miles and there was Evanston, the first city in Wyoming, located just four miles due east of the Utah line.
Twelve thousand people live in Evanston, all of them enrolled in the federal witness protection program.
But of course I jest. Just a little good-natured poke in the ribs to the least populated state in the country.
As close as Evanston is to the border, even if you squint you know you're not in Utah anymore.
This is the place for a whole bunch of stuff that's illegal or hard to find in Utah but isn't illegal or hard to find here.
Just inches into the city you're greeted by several fireworks stores selling fireworks you can't get in Utah, liquor stores selling the kind of potent beer not available off-the-shelf in Utah, an adult book and video store and an Off Track Betting place where you can gamble on horse races and dog races piped in from tracks all around the country, including nearby Wyoming Downs.
I asked the woman at the counter of the fireworks store, Pyro City, if a lot of business sifts over from Utah and she shrugged, "I don't know. We don't ask where our customers are from." Which is Wyoming for "What happens in Evanston stays in Evanston."
Throughout its rich history, Evanston has served as a crossroads as well as a destination. It can be hard to tell the locals from people who are just passing through. You can't get there unless you go through Evanston.
In the 1840s, Evanston was a primary camp along the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. Then it was a station on the original transcontinental railway line that was finished in 1869. And in 1913 when they built the Lincoln Highway — America's first transcontinental paved road — Evanston was a part of that, too.
Now, of course, it is an easy-off, easy-on exit alongside Interstate-80.
You can learn all this at the Uinta County Museum in the center of town, adjacent to the train station, along with the fact that Evanston's nickname is "Queen City of the Mountains," that there was a time when there were more neon lights per capita in Evanston than anywhere in the world, and that Butch Cassidy once spent the night in the Uinta County Jail for stealing horses, which was illegal then and still is — but he broke out shortly thereafter.
I could spend a lot of time soaking up the local culture, but on this trip Evanston is merely the crossroads to return to the northeast corner of Utah. It's only 10 miles on Wyoming Highway 89 back to the Utah border. You can't get there if you don't first get here.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.