FEATURE — Mormons and polygamy. That’s what Utah is mostly known for.
Yes, I know we’re not “Mormons” anymore and I also know polygamy isn’t our thing anymore either. But tell that to the rest of the world.
Of course, there is also our skiing and our red-rocked national parks. Both are incomparable.
As a little girl, I’d regularly venture the fourteen hours from California in my family’s blue conversion van to experience the slopes of Alta in the spring and the red rocks of Zions and Bryce in the summer.
On one such trip when I was five, the vibrant hues of the mountains as we drove into St. George so sparked my childhood imagination, I whipped out my invisible camera and started taking copious shots. “Click, click,” I’d vocalize with every shot. “Click, click.” “Click, click.” This went on for thirty minutes until my aunt, who’d volunteered to help my mom drive our five kids across the hot summer desert, threatened to throw my camera out the window if I didn’t stop.
And apparently, Utah is also known by some for the paranormal. Last month while riding the Dublin Bus, the driver grilled my husband about Skinwalker Ranch in Ballard, Utah for the entirety of our 20-minute ride after learning we were from Utah. He, the bus driver, shared that he’d never visited America – or left Ireland for that matter – but was saving money to come to Utah for the UFO’s.
But really, the Great Salt Lake, that great stretch of salt and brine that melts into the horizon west of Salt Lake, is one of Utah’s most unique assets. According to the Utah Division of Parks, there are only about 30 saltwater lakes in the world and the Great Salt Lake is the largest in the western hemisphere. It’s also the eighth largest terminal lake in the world.
People race on the Great Salt Lake. People float in the Great Salt Lake. People listen to music on the edges of the Great Salt Lake. People even sing about the Great Salt Lake.
Popular Indie group Band of Horses sang about it on their debut album Everything All the Time. That and some whiskey. “Back of the boat was painted wrecking-ball / There was country music playing but he don’t like it all / And red fire poppin’ on the rained-down woody / there was whiskey bottle-spilling and a lake, it was made of salt . . . Well, if you find yourself falling apart / Well, I am sure I could steer / the Great Salt Lake . . . the Great Salt Lake.
Listen to that song and I dare you not to pine for an afternoon walking on the salt-crusted flats, or even better, an afternoon floating on the salty wet itself. Its sunsets, where pinks, oranges, blues and greys dance without definition between the sky and the salt, are something kindred to those otherworldly northern lights.
Not only is the Great Salt Lake picturesque, it’s also iconic. It’s recreation. It’s industry. And, if you didn’t know already, the Great Salt Lake is shrinking. Rapidly.
Much like Lake Urmia in Iran, the largest lake in the middle east, whose salty shores have withered away in the last several years from the size of Delaware to almost nothing.
According to an April 2021 article in Science, a monthly scientific journal, “the lake was at its most expansive in recent decades in the late 1990s, when it stretched nearly 140 kilometers long and 50 kilometers wide, and its volume exceeded 30 billion cubic meters. But a 5-year dry spell that began in 1998 was coupled with increasing water diversion for irrigation. ‘We call it anthropogenic drought,’ says Amir AghaKouchak, a hydrologist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, who first visited Urmia as a student in 1998. By 2013, Urmia’s volume had fallen by a factor of 60, to 500 million cubic meters, exposing salt flats that fueled salt-ridden dust storms.”
Nobody needs to tell us water has been in short supply around here lately, too. People are getting worried about the Great Salt Lake. We probably should have been worried about it sooner. But now is better than later.
In the most recent Utah legislative session, the Speaker of the House Brad Wilson-R and Cedar City’s Senator Vickers-R co-sponsored the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement, which, among other things, gives value to the water in the lake and allows people to donate their water rights to it.
That’s huge.
Dr. Brenda Bowen, a professor of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah who has done extensive research on the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding Bonneville Salt Flats, says there is still more work to do – and it must happen fast. To save the lake. To save the salt flats. To save the brine shrimp. To save it all.
Author Terry Tempest William says, “[The] Great Salt Lake is a place where nothing is as it appears. It is a landscape of the imagination, where anything is possible.”
In this case, let’s hope anything means salvation. For the lake and the rest.
For more information about the Great Salt Lake and efforts to preserve it, visit Friends of the Great Salt Lake at fogsl.org.
Kat Dayton is a columnist for St. George News. Any opinions given are her own and not representative of St. George News staff or management.
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