Editing Interstate 80 (section)

==History==
I-80 was included in the original plan for the [[Interstate Highway System]] as approved in 1956. The highway was built in segments, with the final piece of I-80 completed in 1986 on the western edge of [[Salt Lake City]]. This piece was coincidentally dedicated close to the 30th birthday of the Interstate Highway System, which was noted at the dedication and considered to be a milestone in the history of highway construction in the United States.<ref name=highwayhistory>{{cite journal |first = Richard |last = Weingroff |date = Fall 1986 |url = https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/30thannv.cfm |journal = U.S. Highways |title = America Celebrates 30th Anniversary of the Interstate System |publisher = Federal Highway Administration |access-date = December 28, 2013 |archive-date = October 24, 2011 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20111024114212/https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/30thannv.cfm |url-status = live }}</ref> It was also noted at the dedication that this was only {{convert|50|mi|km}} south of [[Promontory Summit]], where another first in a transcontinental artery was completed—the [[golden spike]] of the US's [[first transcontinental railroad]].<ref name=nytimes>{{cite news |url = https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/25/us/around-the-nation-transcontinental-road-completed-in-utah.html |title = Around the Nation: Transcontinental Road Completed in Utah |newspaper = [[The New York Times]] |agency = [[Associated Press]] |date = August 25, 1986 |oclc = 1645522 |access-date = May 13, 2013 |archive-date = March 16, 2017 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20170316115134/http://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/25/us/around-the-nation-transcontinental-road-completed-in-utah.html |url-status = live }}</ref>

===Geological study===
[[John McPhee]] described the geology revealed by the building of I-80 in a series of books on the formation of the continent of [[North America]], books that were published between 1981 and 1993 and collected in a one-volume edition in 1998 ''[[Annals of the Former World]]'' which won a [[Pulitzer Prize]] in 1999. In "Basin and Range" (1981), he described how the idea emerged in a conversation with Princeton geologist [[Kenneth S. Deffeyes]]:<ref>{{cite book |first = John |last = McPhee |title = Annals of the Former World |location = New York |publisher = Farrar, Straus and Giroux |year = 2000 |pages =  36–37 }}</ref><blockquote>What about Interstate 80, I asked him. It goes the distance. How would it be? "Absorbing," he said. And he mused aloud: After 80 crosses the Border Fault, it pussyfoots along on morainal till that levelled up the fingers of the foldbelt hills. It does a similar dance with glacial debris in parts of Pennsylvania. It needs no assistance on the craton. It climbs a ramp to the Rockies and a fault-block staircase up the front of the Sierra. It is geologically shrewd. It was the route of animal migrations, and of human history that followed. It avoids melodrama, avoids the Grand Canyons, the Jackson Holes, the geologic operas of the country, but it would surely be a sound experience of the big picture, of the history, the construction, the components of the continent.</blockquote>