Big N. Utah Optical Illusion: Ben Lomond Peak Higher Than Willard Peak (not)

         Ben Lomond Peak  (center) and Willard Peak (second bump to the left of BL). Ben Lomond         looks taller here by some sort of illusion, as seen from near Weber State University in Ogden.


  BEN Lomond Peak is NOT higher than nearby Willard Peak.
  It just often times appears that it is taller, in some sort of geographical optical illusion, perhaps one of the biggest such cases in all of Northern Utah.
  Ben Lomond stands at 9,712 feet above sea level.
  Willard Peak is 9,764 feet above sea level, or 52 feet HIGH than Ben Lomond Peak is.
  However, look at Ben Lomond from the south, near Weber State University (top photo) and it appears much taller than Willard Peak is.
  Even look at Ben Lomond and Willard peaks from I-15 coming southbound near the Utah-Idaho stateline and the former appears taller by far than Willard Peak (a southeastern view).
  The only 2 places where Willard seems taller are:
1. From atop either Willard or Ben Lomond Peaks.
2. From Cache County, the south side of Utah State University OR from the south side of the Logan LDS Temple and looking straight south (bottom photo).
  I have no idea why this common illusion is in place, but at least from the straight north is not in play.

 Willard Peak (center) is 52 feet higher than Ben Lomond Peak (left of Willard Peak) and actually appears taller in this viewpoint from the north, as seen from near the Logan LDS Temple in Logan..

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

From ‘Disappointment Island’ to Fremont Island

                                The famous Kit Carson cross on Fremont Island.

FREMONT Island almost became a “Buffalo Park,” several decades before Antelope Island even received its first herd of transplanted bison.

“The ‘Buffalo’ Island. That is what Fremont Island is likely to become. A government appropriation anticipated. An important feature which will be a great addition to Ogden’s many attractions,” was a lengthy May 9, 1890 headline in the Standard-Examiner.

C.J. “Buffalo” Jones wanted to create a buffalo preserve on the island and supposedly had a promise of $30,000 in aid from the federal government to get his project started.

In addition, Jones had talked with the Rio Grande Railroad about the possibility of building a track from its main line, across the Great Salt Lake, to Fremont Island. (This was many years before the Lucin Cutoff was constructed across the GSL.)

Of course, Jones’ plan didn’t happen, but his was one of many dreams for the western Weber County Isle.

The Davis County Clipper reported on Oct. 20, 1899, that there was a plan to develop Fremont Island into a sanitarium. That didn’t happen either. Neither did a proposed dyke ever connect Antelope and Fremont islands as part of a fresh water reservoir plan, first envisioned in 1910.

The first recorded white men to visit Fremont were explorers John C. Fremont and Kit Carson, who visited it on Sept. 9, 1843. Fremont called it "Disappointment Island," for its desert nature and lack of game. Carson was so bored there he chiseled a cross in a rock at the island’s highest point.

Albert Carrington and other Mormon pioneers first visited Fremont on April 22, 1848 and labeled it "Castle Island," for the palace-like rock formation on its north end, where the cross was carved.

By 1859, the Henry Miller family decided it was a perfect place for grazing animals and it was then nicknamed "Miller's Island" until the Fremont name took over permanently

Jean Baptiste, a notorious Salt Lake City cemetery worker/grave robber, was banished by Brigham Young to Fremont Island in the early spring of 1862. He later disappeared and was never found.

In 1886, Uriah J. Wenner, a Salt Lake City judge, bought the island and moved there with his wife, Kate, and several children for five years to hopefully improve his health problems with the salty, fresh air.

                                  The Wenner gravesite on the south end of Fremont Island.

But, Mr. Wenner died there on Sept. 19, 1891 and the family soon moved away.

“Island home is left by owner … Cozy little cottage abandoned on island,” was an Aug. 17, 1906 story in the Salt Lake Tribune about the deserted Wenner home.

Jump ahead in time almost 40 years, to March of 1944 and an Associated Press story told of a “phantom coyote,” who was still unable to be killed or captured on Fremont Island.

This "phantom" coyote, believed to have reached the island a few weeks earlier aboard one of the rare icebergs that sometimes float the Great Salt Lake in late winter, had already killed at least eight sheep there.

                  A trio of hunters with the dead "Phantom Coyote" in 1944.

It required four hunting parties and dozens of hunters on the Island to finally vanquish the critter. Wounded after more than 200 rounds were fired at it on April 2, 1944, the animal was swimming toward Promontory Point and had to be apprehended by boat.

Leap ahead yet another 15 or so years and the State of Utah was looking to create a new state park on either Antelope or Fremont Island. Antelope was chosen and eventually accessed with a newly built causeway.

Fremont Island’s owners then, the Richards Family, who also owned Granite Furniture, still had hopes the state might make their island Utah’s “Alcatraz.” That never happened either.

The island was leased in part over the years to sheepherders and brine shrimpers.

By 1997, the Richards Family felt no long-term use for the island had been found and tried unsuccessfully to sell it for $3 million. "2,943 acres. Lots of history on this island. Great rec. property in green belt," was what the for sale ad highlighted.

By the early 21^st Century, Hooper City included Fremont Island in its official boundaries.

Note: Fremont Island is now owned by the State of Utah, after more than 150 years of various private owners.

(-Originally published by Lynn Arave in the Ogden Standard-Examiner on Oct. 16-17, 2014.)

MORE Fremont Island and Great Salt Lake information:

-Blanche H. Wenner buried her mother’s ashes on Fremont in June of 1943.

-Charles Stoddard of Hooper built the fence around the Fremont gravesite. He used rocks from the old Wenner house to create the memorial with the plaques on.

-Large icebergs reported on GSL in March of 1942.

-From St. Examiner March 13, 1956, Southern Pacific had signed a $49 million contract to replace the wooden trestle of the Lucin Cutoff with rockfill/dirt causeway, 12 miles long and to start in 1960.  High maintence costs and redecking being needed for millions as the reason for the change; plus no fear of fire.

-Only 1 tree on Fremont Island in 1940s.

-Ranchers called Castle rock “Haystack Rock.”

-The first trip of the Lakemobile to Fremont Island was in 1934.

-Phantom Coyote killed 6 or more sheep on Fremont Island. Took 20 hunters and 3 trips to kill it it. Finally Orville Harris of Ogden wounded it and it plunged into the lake. The hunters had to jump into a motor boat to pursue it and kill it. It had lived in the rocky areas of the island. Hunters went by lakemobile, horseback across the sandbar to hunt the critter.

-On Fremont, Stoddard had as many as 700 sheep.

-Stoddard also bought a L.C.V.P. war surplus landing craft to use to reach Fremont from Promontory Point too.

-Stoddard was nicknamed “Utah’s Flying Shepherd” by Western Livestock Journal, because of airlifting in supplies food to his sheep. He would drop a 200-pound load of corn-bean pellets from his plane daily for 2 months to bring 800 sheep through a critical period.

-He also lost horses in the lake’s quicksand:  “To stand there powerless and watch those helpless horses disappear into the quicksand. After that I used a boat,” Stoddard once said.

-Arrowheads, platters, plates and a tablet with strange writing wee all found by Earl Stoddard, cousin to Charles Stoddard, on Fremont Island.

-In 1960, the grass on Fremont gave out and Stoddard had to fly food in 120 straight days by plane.

-By 1961, the lake had dropped so low that 100 lambs waded out in the lake  waters and were lost. Soon after a windstorm at the Ogden airport destroyed his airplane, tethered there.

-Another time a lightning storm caught Fremont Island on fire and he had to move his sheep to Carrington Island for a season.

-In one of the “Phantom coyote hunting photos, 1844 to 1944 is painted on rock above and below the Fremont cross.

-May 4, 1956, fire damages Lucin Cutoff trestle and closed it for several hundred feet. Charles Stoddard’s barge was used by firemen to spray water on the smoldering trestle.

-Feb. 27, 1969. High winds damaged the causeway tp Antelope Island and cut a breach 200 feet wide 3-4 feet deep

 (All this information from Jewell Kenley’s scrapbook of Stoddard, a relative of hers.)

A brief history of the Ogden Standard-Examiner

                       The current Ogden Standard-Examiner building.

By Lynn Arave

THE Ogden Standard-Examiner is Utah’s third-largest daily newspaper and the biggest north of Salt Lake City. It serves more than 60,000 print subscribers readers in the “Top of Utah” -- Weber, Davis, Morgan and Box Elder counties --  as well as many more on the Web.

The Standard officially began on Jan. 1, 1888, though its forerunner, the Ogden Daily Herald, had started seven years earlier in 1881.

Founded by Frank J. Cannon, a former Deseret News and San Francisco Chronicle reporter, the Standard, originally an evening paper, opened in the Peery Building, at 23^rd Street and Washington Avenue.

Cannon vowed that the new newspaper would “endeavor to … merit the confidence and esteem of good and true men.”

He had been unable to salvage the Herald and so he purchased its presses, buildings, subscription lists and ad contracts to provide a successor with the Standard.

By 1892, the newspaper had a circulation of 1,500 copies.

A key change came along in1893, when William Glasmann, 37, took charge of the Standard after Cannon was elected a territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress.(Glasmann would later be elected as the mayor of Ogden City in 1901.)

A year later, in 1894, Glasmann purchased the Standard with proceeds from the sale of his ranch at Lake Point, west of Salt Lake. (A family ownership would prevail for almost a century.)

By 1904, Frank Francis, Standard Associate Editor, began publishing the Ogden Morning Examiner, using the Standard’s presses. He sold that paper to Glasmann four month later, who kept publishing both newspapers until 1911.

In 1911, J.U. Eldredge of Salt Lake purchased the Morning Examiner and it became a competitor of the Standard.

Standard Publisher William Glasmann died at age 57 in 1916. His widow, Evelyn, took over and son, Abe, 23, became editor.

The Standard reacquired the Examiner and merges the two papers to become the Ogden Standard-Examiner in 1920.The composite paper was jointly owned by the Glasmann and Eldredge families through the Standard Corporation.

In 1934, the Standard Corporation entered the broadcast market by acquiring KLO Radio, AM-1430 (which it operated it until 1970). The Standard Corporation also started Salt Lake’s KALL, AM-910, radio in 1945.

The Glasmann family bought out the Eldredge interest in the Standard Corporation in 1946.

The Standard Corporation diversifies further by purchasing controlling interest of KUTV, Ch. 2, TV of Salt Lake, in 1956.

The Standard’s daily circulation exceeded 30,000 by 1959.

In 1961, the Standard purchased the old National Guard Building at 455 23^rd Street for its new offices, where it would remain for almost 40 years. (The newspaper has moved locations six times over the decades.)

The Standard purchased a new press, capable of printing 70,000 48-page papers per hour, in 1969. This move helped the Standard eventually become a local publishing company for other products.

Randall C. Hatch, great-grandson of the original Standard Publisher, William Glasmann, became managing editor, in 1981, keeping a family tradition going.

By the early 1990s, daily circulation of the Standard reached 55,500, when almost 85 percent of the homes in Weber County were loyal subscribers.

The Standard became a subsidiary of Sandusky Newspapers, an Ohio media company, in 1993. The Hatch family, descendants of William Glasmann, also sold its majority interests in KALL radio and KUTV.

The Standard offices moved again in 2000, this time to the Business Depot Ogden, formerly the Defense Depot. The newspaper also switched to morning publication after almost a 110-year-run as an afternoon newspaper, as nationally and locally, readers preferred a morning product.

Today, the Ogden Standard-Examiner has more than 63,000 subscribers in the “Top of  Utah.”

The newspaper is also now much more than a printed product. It offers a 24-hour news source, with updated information on-line. It also features photo galleries, video options of news events and other updates.

In addition, the Standard also offers a career and events page on Standard.net

-The Standard-Examiner, 332 Standard Way, offers free public tours, for groups, large or small, or for classes.

To arrange a tour, contact Summer Green at 801-625-4557, or at sgreen@standard.net

(SOURCES: Ogden Standard-Examiner, “Chronicle of a Century” edition, Jan. 1, 1988; and Utah History Encyclopedia.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

Back when ‘farm days’ postponed school

THERE have been “snows days” of unexpected school recesses in recent years, but how about “farm days"  in olden times?”
“Schools of city may not be opened until October 15, to allow youngsters to work,” was a June 27, 1917 headline in the Standard-Examiner.
An acute labor shortage in Utah some 97 years ago meant that the Davis County School Board had decided to postpone school by at least 10 days for grades seven through twelve.
Soon after that decision, Weber County and Ogden City schools also made similar decisions, referred to as “an expression of community prudence.”
School normally began at the end of September each year.
In a move akin to today’s “Potato Harvest” recess in Southern Idaho, this 1917 decision was so that teenagers could assist in the harvesting of fruits, grains, sugar beets and tomatoes that season.
​(These were the true "field days" for students in olden times.)
The decision was reached after a conference with the canners and sugar company representatives of the area.
Davis County had already been given 150 men from the National Guard to help with their crops, but more manpower was needed.
Davis County farmers had also said that if some Ogden boys had not been sent to assist with thinning their sugar beet crop already in early summer, they would have faced a disaster.
However, the recess was not a “free pass” to miss school. Besides the expectation to do farm work, plans were made by the school board to hold school six days a week until the lost time was made up. Some of these extra Saturday school days were in the winter season, leaving good weather Saturdays in spring still available.
In other historical notes:
- “Deer hunters’ chances good” was an Oct. 17, 1926 headline in the Standard.
For that era, the hunt opened Oct. 20 and closed Oct. 20. The basic rules of the hunt were: no boys under age 16 allowed to hunt; each hunter was allowed one buck with horns at least six inches long; all hunters to be wear a red hat, or red covering; a license for male hunters cost $2 and for female hunters, $1.
Hunting was also prohibited in the game sanctuary, from Weber Canyon to North Ogden Canyon and from east Ogden to the city wells in Ogden Valley. (This “no hunting” area existed only in the 1920s.)
-“Daylight motion pictures at the Orpheum a success,” was an Oct. 2, 1911 headline in the Standard.
This didn’t mean matinees – it meant a new machine projected the moving pictures on a dark background, instead of a white one – to be easier on the eyes.
Motion pictures were shown five nights a week, Saturday through Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. (Thursday and Friday nights were vaudeville nights.) Admission was 5 cents to 10 cents a show.

(-Originally published on Oct. 9-10, 2014 by Lynn Arave in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

The Utah ‘Footloose’ of 1912 and more …

YOU could call this the ‘Footloose’ of 102 years ago.
“Apostle M’Kay opposes dance,” was a Feb. 1, 1912 headline in the Standard-Examiner.
Then Elder David O. McKay of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was speaking at a quarterly Utah Stake Conference in Provo and said he was opposed to the trend of public dance halls and the moral decline therein.
He said anyone with the 50 cents admission could enter such a dance hall and that they were filled with dancing of an “immoral nature.”
Elder McKay then singled out a dance hall in Ogden that had posted the sign, “No introductions necessary,” meaning any women entering this dance hall was expected to dance with any man who asked her to do so.
“These conditions will have to be remedied or the public dance will be fought by the Latter-day Saints,” he said.
In the same meeting, it was reported that in this Utah Stake, there were 121 temple marriages and 74 civil marriages performed in 1911. There were only four divorces by any members of that stake that year.
-Jump ahead 15 years and other vices were singled out by LDS Church leaders.
An Aug. 29, 1927 headline in the Standard was “Card playing breaks rule, Heber J. Grant tells throng.”
President Grant of the LDS Church spoke at an Ogden Stake Conference in the Ogden Tabernacle.
He said those who regularly play cards should sing the popular LDS hymn, “We thank thee, O God for a Prophet” differently than what the song book says.
“We thank three, O God for a Prophet, To guide us in these latter-days, providing he does not tell us to leave our cards alone and then we desire to follow our own ideas” is how President Grant said card playing church members should sing the song.
President Grant also advised unmarried young men and women not to put their arms around each other.
“He said in so doing they are running dangerously near the edge of the precipice and Satan has an opportunity to cast over them,” the article reported.
In addition, President Grant said only one-third of the Church was then obeying the Word of Wisdom. He also said there was a church member who thought drinking a little coffee was OK. Then a cigar was alright and then chewing tobacco didn’t seem to hurt him either. However, he said that member was also an apostle and lost that position.
President also said every effort is made to put the best man available in every church position, without personal favoritism of any kind.
“There is no trading and no political wire pulling in his church,” President Grant declared.
Since President Grant had not visited Ogden for some time, this two-hour stake conference was filled to overflowing, with many not be able to find a seat.

(-Originally published in the Ogden Standard-Examiner on Oct. 3, 2014.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

When Devil’s Slide was really a slide and more

                                 Devil’s Slide today.

DEVIL'S Slide is a bizarre, giant-size limestone chute, located on the south side of I-84 in Weber Canyon, near Croydon, and about eight miles east of Morgan.

Composed of two parallel slabs of rock about 20 feet apart, some 40 feet high and about 200 feet long, this odd phenomenon has attracted the curious gaze of passerbys since Pioneer times.

The first pioneers through the area in the 1840s (and their maps) referred to the Croydon area of upper Weber Canyon as “Gutter Defile,” in honor of what would eventually become famous as Devil’s Slide.

Who named the rock formation Devil’s Slide?

James John Walker (1830-1896), an early resident of Croydon and a railroad worker, is very likely the first person to have called it Devil’s Slide.

A Walker family history states that James Walker was a contractor on the railroad, installing the first tracks through upper Weber Canyon. Probably around 1868, he was asked (being a local resident) by a railroad crew what to call this unusual rocky chute and his reply was Devil’s Slide and the title stuck.

The first official mention of that name for the rock formation in a newspaper was in 1875.

"Looking like a large playground slide fit only for the Devil, this site is a tilted remnant of sediments deposited in a sea that occupied Utah's distant geologic past," Carl Ege of the Utah Geological Survey explains on geology.utah.gov.

By 1904, limestone was found in abundance in the area of Devil’s Slide and soon a cement worker’s town sprung up there. Workers initially began calling the new community Portland, in honor of the Union Portland Cement Company.

However, railroad people objected to that name and insisted on a Devil’s Slide moniker instead. They won out and by 1907 the local post office was also called Devils Slide. (Note that there was no apostrophe to the town's name.)

The cement company’s packages even sported the startling image of the devil sliding down the rock chute on his pitchfork for many years. The company’s baseball team was also called the Red Devils.

The town reached its heyday in the late 1920s, before the Great Depression, when it boasted 529 residents. By the 1940s, its school closed and by the 1980s, only a few families still resided there. Soon after, the cement company closed the town and today a gravel pit and rubble mostly cover what remains of this ghost town.

      A 1947 photo of Devil’s Slide shows visitor Venice Carson Flygare of Grouse Creek/Ogden.                     Note how close the viewpoint to the Slide was back then, in the pre-freeway era.

Going back in time again, “Mystic Shriners at Devil’s Slide” was an Aug. 22, 1911 headline in the Standard, The Shriners held special ceremonies and initiations around the formation. Included was a hike to the top of Devil’s Slide, followed by an optional, daring slide downward.

Did this really happen? Perhaps, but the natural rock slide ends dozens of feet away from the Weber River, which is why a special pool of water was apparently set up at the bottom by the Shriners.

 “Devil’s Slide jinks success; El Kalah Temple Mystic Shrine holds unique ceremonial at that spot; Novices slide incline into fathomless pool” ” was a Sept. 16, 1910 headline in the Salt Lake Tribune, showing they had also used the Slide a year earlier.

Several hundred Shriners took a special train to the Slide and even set up tents in the area. Sliding down the Slide was also featured that year.

Ogden began promoting Devil’s Slide as a tourist attraction in the mid 1920s, with signs. Devil’s Gate, at the lower end of Weber Canyon, was also boasted of in numerous Standard-Examiner reports of the 1920s.

Today, there are posted turnouts to view the slide just off both directions of I-84. However, in the pre-freeway era, a 1947 picture of Devil’s Slide shows the viewing area much closer to the formation than it is today. Back then, the dirt access road (in front of Devil’s Slide today) may have been the main road before the Interstate came along.

Now, the slide’s bottom is choked with brush and some private land fronts the Slide.

Hauntingly, there are also "Witch Rocks" and the small "Goblin Slides" rock formations in the same area of upper Weber Canyon.

The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on June 28, 1888 that told the tale of an out-of-stater fishing the Weber River in that area with an Indian guide. This Native American believed the area to be the Devil’s territory and even pointed out another nearby rock formation that was said to be the “Devil’s War Club.”

-As unusual as the Top of Utah’s Devil’s Slide may seem, it is not unique. There is a same-named and similar rock formation about five miles north of Gardiner, Mont. Just north of Yellowstone National Park, off U.S. 89, this Devil's Slide, though has a twist — a big curve in its slabs of parallel rock.

(-Originally published in the Ogden Standard-Examiner on Sept. 26, 2014 by Lynn Arave.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

Ogden Canyon’s trolley rolled from 1909-1932

                                                The mouth of Ogden Canyon today.

OGDEN area residents loved their Ogden Canyon enough to warrant a railroad there. And, at one time it was hoped the rails there would access Utah’s “summer capitol,” had that suggested building been built.
An electric railroad trolley from Ogden to Huntsville opened in July of 1915.
A partial Ogden Canyon railroad had already been operating to the Hermitage Resort since 1909, since the canyon and its resorts were viewed as great possible revenue producers.
For almost a quarter of a century, this electrified rail line offered reliable transportation into Ogden Canyon and for 17 of those years it traveled from the Ogden Depot to Huntsville, by way of Eden.
There was no Pineview Dam in those days to detour around, but the line required five steel bridges. It was also quite the engineering marvel, having to hug the canyon walls through the “Narrows” in the lower canyon and rock cliffs further up the canyon – some up to 100 feet high – had to be removed for rail construction.
Just three rugged miles of railway construction in Ogden Canyon cost $100,000 (that’s the equivalent of $2.4 million in 2014 dollar value). Concrete and steel helped hold the rail grade in place, often running next to the wagon road in the canyon.
According to the Standard-Examiner, some 100 men were employed constructing the line in 1912.
There were also complicated right of way issues to deal with. 
By July of 1912, the Standard on July 18 reported that the Ogden Rapid Transit Company had decided to change its route in the upper canyon. Instead of following the south side of the river, it switched to the north side – even though that meant abandoning some of the old line and conducting new surveys.
“This is one of the most important trolley line extensions undertaken …” the Standard reported. “This opening of Ogden Valley to beet culture and more intensive cultivation in every way, promises to build up a much larger farming population, which directly must benefit the city. It will not be many years when beets, hay, grain and dairy products will be shipped to Ogden by the trainload,” the 1912 story concluded.
Early on, Simon Bamberger, who owned the Bamberger railroad (and who would later become Utah’s fourth governor) and who also owned the Heritage, desired a rail line to his resort.
Ogden Rapid Transit wanted such a line too and had the much earlier start, but for a time, both railroads were creating separate grades in Ogden Canyon. Eventually Bamberger withdrew and his section of completed grade became part of the public road though Ogden Canyon.
The trolley line carried some 7,000 passengers during the fourth of July holiday of 1910.
By May of 1913 and through the warm weather season, the Trolley to the Hermitage offered cars once an hour. The first car left Ogden at 10:30 a.m. and the last one at 7:30 p.m.
The first trolley cars used carried 46 passengers and had both smoking compartments and toilets.
Besides high hopes for farming and shipping with the trolley line, there was also an effort afoot in 1911-1912 to try and convince the State of Utah to have a “summer capitol” in beautiful Ogden Valley, about three miles southeast of Huntsville.
Of course, that never happened, but the Ogden Rapid Transit Company was prepared to extend its trolley line there.
P.L . Orth, secretary of the Huntsville Improvement Club, was pushing the summer capitol drive and declared in a Feb. 28, 1912 Standard story that, “Huntsville no longer sleeps.”
Orth also wanted to utilize warm spring waters in the valley to encourage more development there.
Back to the trolley line  -- By 1913, several trolleys used were modified to be open roof observation cars. 
The line also weathered lots of snowslides over the years. For example, the Standard on Feb. 18, 1926 reported that three avalanches had buried the tracks in Ogden Canyon. It took almost two full days to clear the tracks and restore full service again.
However, it wasn’t snow or even the advent of the automobile that doomed the Ogden Canyon line. It was the severe flooding in the canyon during 1932 that badly damaged the tracks. 
In September of 1932, regulatory approval was given to halt rail service and remove the tracks. Buses and trucks now used the canyon highway to compensate for the lack of a trolley.
The old rails in the upper section were removed during 1934, when Pineview Dam construction began. The rails in Ogden Canyon were initially used to transport material to build Pineview. Then, they too were removed to end the era of iron rails in Ogden Canyon.
-Some source material came from utahrails.net, by Don Strack.

(-Originally published on Sept. 20, 2014 in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net