If this is Thursday it must be postcards, 615

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devil’s Slide, Weber Canyon, Utah, 1940s

 

Usually, vintage postcards are 100 years old or older.  This unused card is not that old but it was identified as a vintage card dating from the 1940s by different sellers.  I found this one in a jumble box at an antique pavilion.  It is a linen-type card with natural color printed by the E.C. Kropp Co. and published by Ogden News, Co., Ogden, Utah. 

 

 

This is a souvenir card featuring a picture of the geological formation located near the border of Wyoming and Utah and called Devil’s Slide.  The Weber River flows between the freeway and the slide along I-84.  Parking and viewing areas can be found on both sides of the highway.  The river and a passenger train can be seen.

 

 

There is a short blurb at the upper left and the number 374 at the top right side, both on the reverse.  The information in the blurb is slightly different from more modern information: “Stretching imagination was not required to name the outcropping of porphyry, Devil’s Slide, rising from the water below and extending far up the side of the mountain in Weber’s Canyon, near Echo.  The two limestone reefs are 20 feet apart and stand out 40 feet from the general slope of the canyon side.”  Note:  The Wikipedia.org article, linked below, has the distance between the reefs as 8 ft or 2.4 m.  The card calls the rock both porphyry and limestone while the Wikipedia.org article just describes the rock as limestone.  Porphyry is a decorative granite or igneous rock that has crystals, feldspar, and quartz embedded in it.  For interested readers, Wikipedia.org includes a couple of legends about Devil’s Slide.

 

This is one of four other such formations in the United States, including in California and Montana called Devil's Slide.  Originally discovered by Utah settlers who were working on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1840s, the Utah slide was also called “Gutter Defile.” 

 

For more information, see:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Slide_(Utah)

http://www.sentfromthepastpostcards.com/index.php/publishers/e-c-kropp-co/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyry_(geology)