The Thousand Mile Tree

This spot in Weber Canyon marks a small milestone with a big story. In January of eighteen sixty-nine, as crews of the Union Pacific raced west to complete the first transcontinental railroad, their tracks reached a tall pine standing beside the line. By happy coincidence, it stood exactly one thousand miles from the eastern starting point at Omaha, Nebraska. The workers hung a sign on it reading One Thousand Miles from Omaha, and the lonely pine became a famous landmark.

The golden spike that joined the rails was driven only a few months later, in May of that same year. Travelers riding the new line would crane their necks for a look at the Thousand Mile Tree. The original pine died and was cut down around nineteen hundred, but the railroad later planted a new tree here to mark the place where the great race once paused to count its miles.