4 Corners Trip 2023

We are back!

On Monday, December 4, we set out from Ohio to the Four Corners (the geographical location where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet). While we were on the road I shared quite a few selfies and quick photos that I took with my iPhone, but now that we are home I wanted to share a few photos that I took with a real camera. Unfortunately, I took too many photos… there is no way I can post them all one-day-at-a-time before the end of the year.

But that’s okay. I’ll post some of them, and hopefully they’ll be enjoyable to see.

The first photo I am going to share is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. For as many times as I have driven by the St. Louis Gateway Arch, I have never stopped to actually see it up close. So on our way out west, we pulled off the highway and got out of the vehicle to check it out.

It is very cool!

Did you know that the St. Louis Gateway Arch National Park is also known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial? The arch itself is 630 feet tall, and it stands as a symbol of the western expansion of the United States. The arch is fairly recent. It was completed in 1965.

If you have ever driven by the arch, you may have wondered why in the world it was sitting there in St. Louis. Believe it or not, the reason the arch sits in St. Louis is because St. Louis was originally the capital city of the Louisiana Territory.

In 1803, the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, managed to secure the purchase of 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million from France. This purchase doubled the size of the United States, expanding the country westward. If you do the math, that land costed roughly 4 cents per acre!

Ironically, the original cost to build the Gateway Arch was nearly the same as the entire Louisiana Purchase, but it has since been renovated for $380 million dollars.