Travelogue: The Great Salt Lake

Some places leave an indellible impression and come often to mind after even but a brief experience. Here is one such destination.

To hear it from the locals, the Great Salt Lake is just this hot, smelly place with lots of brine flies. There seems to be a rite of passage in previous generations: Mom would one hot summer day drag the kids out to the Great Salt Lake and set up for a day at the beach. They were going to be there all day, so the kids figured out how to swim in the smelly, fly-infested, spectacularly buoyant water.
As it turns out, there is so much more to the Great Salt Lake than a hot, gross swimming hole. It is of a scale that truly astonishes, especially for those from a modest stretch of earth with moss-covered rocks, winding old roads, and small, human-sized trails through the woods. This is not that. To get to the Great Salt Lake, you drive up the valley in which perches Salt Lake City. From the interstate, you drive ten miles down a more and more sparsely populated road. Then the fun: A turn out toward Antelope Island brings you to the ranger station where you pay your $10 entrance fee and then you pick your jaw up off the floor as you commence the fantastical journey. 
A thin ribbon of fresh black asphalt carries you miles out to the island. Gradually more and more iridescent water appears stretching out on either side of the thoroughfare. Flocks of birds eerily wait, still on the still water. The whole island and all the water appear but a mirage, and every object, like the birds, appears as though it could be a trick of the eyes. Is there anything there? 
Rising out of the land across the silvery stretches of water are the thundering peaks, already snow-capped from the first week of October. The fact of this mysterious island you may be least prepared for is the silence. This great basin of saltwater takes sound into itself, making the treading of wheels, noise blowing on the wind, your own thoughts– quiet, at some angles totally imperceptible. Driving up, the only notable noise is the slight flick, flick, flick as countless droves of brine flies lose their short lives on the hood and windshield of the car.
The incipient feeling that is unmistakable is one that arises when watching astronauts in far-fetched sci-fi exploring worlds with alien life. The desire to scream frantically at them through the screen, “Run! You are not welcome here!” keeps rising in a subtle panic. On a mild, sunny day this is obviously hyperbolic but you can’t quite shake it. The feeling is prompted by the unrelenting glare of the big sky over all that salty abyss and by omens such as what seems unmistakeably a hulking animal carcass, great exposed ribs standing out of the water. Driving closer it is, of course, not a toppled dinosaur, but, inexplicably, a large, unattached tree stump with branches rising from the water like tentacles. Is it petrified wood? In that strange place, it could be; there are so many stranger things.
Reaching the island, there are several smooth roads going in different directions to different promontories, beaches, and destinations unknown. Desert vegetation and red-tinged boulders obscure the sudden and shocking sight of bison. All of a sudden, a bison is mere feet from the car, standing like stone, majestic, as if standing in silent contempt of us whose kind have soaked the West with the blood of his legion kin. This is the very last place in America where you can hunt bison, just once a year as part of a government-organized effort to cull the population and keep the island safe for tourists. It would be satisfying to our worst tendencies to see the bison cull the population of smartphone users who jog up to them in their skinny jeans to snap selfies at an entirely unsafe proximity. Does the phone really so obscure the commonsense of staying away from beasts so much larger than we? 
Antelope Island does not, in case you are wondering, have antelope. The name comes from a misidentification of the mule deer who roam the land.
A drive along the winding, black veins of the island takes you to a wide deck painted red, the trailhead for one of those stunning promontories. The air is cool, but at this altitude, the sun, even in October, is piercingly bright and hot as you climb. The rocks are shocking to the eyes in their eccentricities. Some look like poured concrete mixed with pebbles; others are great white things with lines of pink imprisoned in the stone in some long-ago underground pressure chamber. 
Being at the Great Salt Lake you are at the lowest point of this region, and yet, you are thousands of feet above sea level, scurrying across a massive bowl in a vast mountain range. The air is thin, dry. Once again, the haunting sensation that this place does not want us here may occur. 
At the top of the trail is a high plateau marked by great big jutting red boulders (strewn by some passing glacier?). When you look out on the Great Salt Lake from this vantage point you can finally begin to guess at its vastness. It extends on all sides, seemingly forever, this grayish, silver water reflecting blue skies, purple mountains, hints of the red rock around you. 
The first Spanish explorers to reach this place from Mexico at first mistook it for the Pacific. Certainly, it seems big enough from here, but there is no intimation of rhythmic waves anywhere in sight. The stillness is unnerving. 
The white beach, even from here looking to be made of fine grains, extends a long way. It looks like a short stroll down to the water until you look closely for the people, specks who have walked half a mile of sand to dally along the briny edge. At times over the course of years, the lake rises dramatically, swallowing up many acres of land, then gradually contracting to reveal these vast stretches of white sand. 
You may know all this looking out, but still the perspective is all wrong. The land beneath you drops off but juts up unpredictably in its slope down to the water, giving the illusion that you are much closer than you seem. It takes the noticing of a tiny car reflecting a sudden beam of light, the two neat rows of campers, or a single person walking far below to realize just how big this is. 
And it is very big. On a perfectly clear day, you can see the curvature of the Earth. The saltwater extends before you 20 miles that could be seen on a clear day, and then another 15 beyond that. Those last 15 would be curving down and away from you making the mountains on the other side rise up to us stunted over the bending of the Earth.
And yet, despite that unimaginable scale, the Great Salt Lade is only 12 feet at its deepest, and its creatures are diminutive. After another drive along those twisting black roads radiating the intense sun (and perhaps a stop that involves eating a gamy buffalo burger–how could you not try to ingest more of this strange place that you struggled to make out with your eyes and ears enfeebled by bright sun and noise-deadening salt water?) you stand like a little ant on a metal plank leading to the beach. 
Walking down the Swiss-cheese holed metal plank, you touch down in the soft, gray-white sand. Then the truly strange features emerge. What looks like unremarkable beach from above is complex and varied, representing different seasons of water and sun. A long stretch of beach has large, cracked plates of concrete-hard sand on top of loose sand. Picking up a jagged piece feels like shale or shattered tile with great flecks of salt (If you are committed to the experience, you surreptitiously take a tiny lick. And, yes, it is very salty.) 
Further on, across white sand and gray sand (and passing a tourist carrying a puppy in her pants pocket which somehow escaped and became trapped in the main cavity of her pants prompting fears from her family that the puppy would suffocate and an awkward huddle to dislodge the unfortunate miniature canine), you come to great bands of red on the beach. They looked like pine needles or pollen, but neither are around. Only after reaching the waters’ edge and seeing the brine shrimp squiggling through the shallows do you understand: the red bands are the thousands upon thousands of brine shrimp and larval brine flies baked by the sun as the water recedes over the course of the summer. Examination confirms: the great red bands are a mosaic of delicate little exoskeletons.
There on the water’s edge, the full mystery of the place is before you. A hint of mountains in a dull purple on every side, saltwater stretching on seemingly forever. How can it be that an eccentric group of polygamists moving West found the unwanted desert valley and settled here? How is it that these extra-biblical “saints” managed to find the inland body of saltwater second only to the Dead Sea in the Holy Land when they were creating their Zion? This is why Salt Lake City has its name. The Great Salt Lake is not an incidental place of miserable afternoon outings with lots of brine flies. The Great Salt Lake marks the surface of our planet in a manner that is meaningful, significant, and incomprehensible.