Tour the Museum of Natural History of Utah

The National Genealogical Society (NGS) 2020 Family History Conference, May 20-23 in Salt Lake City is offering spectacular pre-conference tours. This trip starts with a chartered bus ride up to the spectacular University of Utah campus for a visit to the Natural History Museum of Utah, which houses over 1.5 million artifacts highlighting the stories of the peoples of Utah as well as the evolution of the rugged and sometimes harsh land in which they lived. Indeed, the mission statement of the museum is “to illuminate the natural world and the place of humans within it.”

The Rio Tinto Center which houses the museum is an architectural beauty, built in terraces to blend with the mountain terrain and clad in 42,000 square feet of local copper mined at Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine across the valley. The copper cladding was installed in bands of various heights to represent the layered rock formations found throughout Utah.

Transportation and box lunch provided for $65. Register early to secure your place.

The Museum of Natural History of Utah

Red Butte Garden & Arboretum

Red Butte Garden and Arboretum

After a box lunch in the museum, the tour continues next door at the Red Butte Garden &Arboretum, a wonderland of beautiful flowers, herb gardens, shady woodland walks, burbling streams, and waterfalls.

While the museum is a new addition to the university campus, the arboretum is almost ninety years old. In 1930, the chairman of botany at the University of Utah, Dr. Walter P. Cottam, used land on the eastern edge of campus to study and evaluate plants for their adaptability to the region. By 1961, his life’s work and impressive collection of plants and trees was recognized by the Utah State Legislature and designated as the State Arboretum.

Today, Red Butte Garden showcases twenty-one acres of beautiful display gardens including a fragrance garden, herb garden, medicinal garden, children’s garden, and rose garden. During the NGS Conference in May it will be gloriously in full bloom.