Price City Councilman Layne Miller speaks on TravelStorys during the Carbon County Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Thursday.
TravelStorys is known for its proprietary podcast-style audio tours that take travelers through iconic locations, highlighting all the area has to offer. Three Carbon County destinations are highlighted through the app, including Helper City, Nine Mile Canyon and Price City.
The app uses GPS on the user’s phone, meaning no network is required. This is especially helpful in Nine Mile Canyon, where reception can be spotty or even non-existent. Those utilizing the audio tour will have stories that play automatically based on the device’s GPS coordinates.
In Nine Mile Canyon, TravelStorys features 20 stops. Layne Miller, who is well known for his canyon tours, said that this is especially helpful in the canyon where many of the notable sites are more difficult to find. While there are hundreds of petroglyphs spread throughout Nine Mile Canyon, TravelStorys highlights some of the most notable and helps travelers spot them along their journey.
Continuing into Price, TravelStorys highlights 10 stops, which teach travelers about the cowboys, coal miners, entrepreneurs and pioneers who came to the Carbon Corridor seeking the American dream. This story takes travelers on a downtown walking tour, where castle-like rock formations tower over lands once filled with dinosaurs.
Then, moving on to historic Helper, TravelStorys once again features a 10-stop tour. This walking tour teaches the history of the country’s westward expansion, enabled by the Transcontinental Railroad and accelerated by the coal boom. This brought a wave of immigrants to the remote community of Helper, which quickly became a melting pot of ethnicities and religions. The tour takes listeners down historic Main Street, highlighting key points along the way.
Miller encouraged community members to explore their own backyards this summer with the free TravelStorys app. He said that even though he has lived in the community for years, there were many things he learned while exploring with the tours. The TravelStorys app is free to download and can be used on most devices.