6 Days Until Trek - Seeing the Salt Lake Valley

While these passages describe the experiences of the first pioneer company that arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in July of 1847, all pioneers would have experienced the exhilaration of seeing the Salt Lake Valley for the first time and realizing that their journey was almost done. "Home" is such a powerful idea. Do you have places that feel like home? That you would consider your home? Have you ever moved from one home to another? While the pioneer experience was different in many ways from ours, they also shared many experiences and feelings that we have today. 

"Whether the Saints had driven a wagon, pushed and pulled a handcart, herded the cattle, or walked the entire route on blistered feet, the promise of better days and freedom to worship in peace awaited in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. The Saints, some of whom had wandered along the banks of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and the flatlands of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa for nearly fifteen years, found a haven at last near a huge salt-water lake and towering mountains.

"Many of the pioneers waxed poetic when they recalled seeing the valley. They had surmounted tragedy, starvation, and struggle. Their faith and determination - and Brigham's exhortations and threats - had brought them home. It must have looked like heaven after the experience at Winter Quarters. It must have also felt like heaven. Wilford Woodruff wrote on July 24, 1847, thoughts that were no doubt shared by many who had traveled in that vanguard company: 'Our hearts were surely made glad after A Hard Journey from winter Quarters of 1,200 miles through flats of Platt River, steeps of the Black Hills & the Rocky mountains And burning sands of the eternal Sage ...  to gaze upon a valley of such vast extent entirely Surrounded with a perfect chain of everlasting hills & mountains Covered with eternal snow with there [sic] inumerable peaks ... towards Heaven presenting at one view the grandest & most sublime seenery Probably that could be obtained on the globe. Thoughts of Pleasing meditation ran in rapid succession through our minds while we contemplated that not many years that the House of God would stand upon the top of the Mountains while the valleys would be converted into orchard, vineyard, gardings [sic] & field by the inhabitants of zion & the Standard be unfurled for the nations to gather.'

"Martha P. Jones of Thomas, who left Nauvoo in the fall of 1846, with nothing but her eight children, 'trusting God like Abraham,' earned the money for a 'fit-out' to Zion, by weaving in Council Bluffs. She summed up her experience with this comment: ' Who could not acknowledge the hand of God in our deliverance.'"

Selection from Stanley B. and Violet T. Kimball's 2011 book, Villages on Wheels: A Social History of the Gathering to Zion.

AI-image critique. That is not what the Salt Lake Valley looks like from the Wasatch Mountains, but you get the idea. This captures the feeling of "destination" and "home."