Box Elder County, Utah

Box Elder County is in northwest Utah, north and northwest of the Great Salt Lake. The Golden Spike National Historic Site is here. There are some high, forested mountain areas along the eastern and northern edges of the county but a lot of the landscape is covered with masses of desert scrub, making the landscape about as barren as desert can get without just being sand dunes. There is a section of the Sawtooth National Forest in the north-central portion of the county against the Idaho border.

Box Elder County contains 5,723 square miles of land and 1,006 square miles of water. The county seat is Brigham City.

There's a lot of history here, as well as many stories of broken dreams. The first Transcontinental Railroad crossed the lower part of Box Elder County, just to the north of the Great Salt Lake. That railbed is now the Transcontinental Railroad Back Country Byway. There were several attempts to turn that land north of the railroad into productive cattle ranch but there was a problem with the grass and other forage, never mind the overall lack of water. Some mining did occur but not enough to amount to much. Even the outlaws of the day preferred the barrens of Wyoming to the hinterlands of Box Elder County. Most of the population today lives along a strip paralleling Interstate 15 and the western foothills of the Wellsville Mountains.