Deseret Power Railway Units 1, 2 and 3 sweep past acres of sage brush and exposed outcrops at 27 Mile, about halfway between the Utah border and Deseret Power Plant.
One of the few level areas along the DPR is this two-mile run across the bottom of Coyote Basin, where the line gracefully curves amongst curiously-shaped and -colored rock formations of the unusual landscape, which soon-to-retire engineer Jim says "looks closer to the surface of the moon than any place I've ever been." The colorful "dunes" are actually mudstones and shales, both being types of rock which weather easily and form such fantastic shapes as they erode. The sediments comprising those strata were deposited during the upper Eocene Epoch -- some 35 million years ago -- on the bottom of historic Lake Uinta, whose unique chemistry was responsible for vast deposits of valuable natural resources in this otherwise-barren corner of the state. (My thanks to Dick Ebright for sharing his knowledge of the area's geology.)
