Golden Spike National Historic Site

The transcontinental line was built by two companies working toward each other. The Central Pacific pushed east from Sacramento, blasting and tunneling through the granite of the Sierra Nevada, while the Union Pacific drove west across the Great Plains and the Rockies. For years they raced, because each was paid by the mile, until Congress finally set Promontory Summit as the meeting point.

The ceremony itself was part triumph and part comedy. Dignitaries gathered, speeches were made, and the final spike, made of gold, was tapped in gently so as not to damage it, then quickly pulled back out and replaced with an ordinary iron one. When the two railroad presidents each swung at the spike, at least one is said to have missed entirely, to the delight of the crowd of workers looking on.

The railroad was built by the muscle of tens of thousands of laborers, and the Central Pacific's workforce was overwhelmingly Chinese. Chinese crews did the most dangerous work, hanging in baskets to set charges on cliff faces and boring the Sierra tunnels through solid rock in deep snow, and many died in the effort. For generations their role was left out of the story, and the site now works to give them their due, including at the anniversary each year.

The Union Pacific side drew Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans of both armies, formerly enslaved men, and Mormon crews hired locally in Utah. The land the tracks crossed was the homeland of the Shoshone, Ute, Goshute, and Paiute peoples, whose lives and hunting grounds the railroad divided and disrupted profoundly, a cost that traveled beneath the celebration and is remembered here as well.

The two locomotives that met at Promontory, the Central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's No. 119, were scrapped long ago, but the park had exact working replicas built and they are the heart of a visit. Painted in bright period colors, brass gleaming, they steam out along the track in season and ease toward each other until they nearly touch, just as they did on the famous day.

You can walk the restored grade and see the ties and rails laid in the old way, and short auto tours follow the original railroad bed out across the desert, past cuts and fills that crews shaped by hand. Standing on that empty ridge, it is easy to picture the crowds, the whistles, and the sudden quiet of a continent joined.

Promontory Summit rises above the northern reaches of the Great Salt Lake, a country of sagebrush flats, low ridges, and the wide wetlands where the Bear River pours into the lake. Pronghorn range the benches, jackrabbits and coyotes work the sage, and hawks and eagles hunt the open ground, while the marshes below draw great flocks of migrating birds.

Summer here is hot and bright, with little shade on the exposed ridge, and winter can be bitterly cold and windy, which is why the locomotives are stored away in the coldest months. Spring and fall are the gentlest times to visit, when the air is mild and the light lies long and gold across the sage, and the whole scene looks close to how it did in 1869.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.