Making Peace With the Great Salt Lake

When I was a teenager, my mom took us to the Great Salt Lake one summer day.  I had grown up with stories of how much fun my grandparents and parents had had on their family excursions there.  I knew I needed to experience the buoyancy and sheer delight for myself.  Then we got out of the car.  It smelled like death, carnage, and sulfur.  There were brine flies swarming everywhere.  There was at least 15 feet of tar-like muck (swarming with flies) between the dry sand and the water's edge.  We never touched the water.  We beat it out of there and I never felt a need to "try" it again.

Fast forward 25 years.  Our family had planned to go camping in Bryce Canyon over the long weekend.  Lee had taken the days off and we were going to have our last hurrah for the year.  Then the national parks closed.  Then the weather forecast for Bryce was snow and overnight lows in the mid 20s.  We started searching for other alternatives.  That's how I happened to be browsing the State Park website and Antelope Island State Park caught my attention.  We decided to go for it.  We decided against camping since the weather was unpredictable, but spent Saturday afternoon there.  We even brought my parents and sister-in-law with us to balance out the rest of the nay-sayers in the car.  (Plus also, my parents have a national parks pass which was being accepted at state parks for the weekend.)

At the historic ranch on the southeast end of the island, we explored all that was to be seen.  My mom was quick to point out to the kids that they needed to make sure they knew the difference between the antlers and the unclers.

I learned that silos had to be properly ventilated because wheat is still a living organism after it is harvested and as such, it gives off heat.  Silos can explode, sending concrete everywhere, if the heat can't escape.  I will never be able to drive past a silo again without those eloquent educational words in my head.

We hiked to the top of Dooly Knob.  Don't you just want to hike there so you can say that name over and over?  Lizzie found a science fair project to do along the way, so that kept her occupied.  She will be studying whether the beetles she found inside of the dying weeds were an infestation or a fluke.  Also, lest you think I grew up in a refined household, when Lizzie pointed out that one of the piles of Bison dung next to the trail looked like a flower, my dad picked it up and flung it playfully at her.  Fortunately he missed.  We didn't let him stick his hand in the treat bag for the rest of the hike.

We witnessed a veritable Bison stampede.  Did you know that the 600+ Bison on Antelope Island are the largest free roaming herd of American Bison in the United States?

And Lizzie and I braved the 60 degree weather so we could say we'd floated in the Great Salt Lake.  The water was clear and like glass and there wasn't a bit of stink to it.  We were several hundred feet away from the beach and the water was still below my knees!  The beach was sandy, with a few bands of brine shrimp carcasses, but it was cold enough that there was no biodegrading or munching going on.  It almost made me want to return in the summer so that we could swim in better conditions.  But then I remembered the flies.

And so, I have made peace with the Great Salt Lake.  And I might just smile instead of cringe the next time I drive past.