Antelope Island

I've been somewhat fascinated by the idea of this place ever since I found out about it.  The first day we arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley I was looking for something for Kristi and I to do.  I wanted to see the Great Salt Lake.  I've been hearing about it for a long time and it was one of the reasons I agreed with Kristi to come here on some extra days we had on our tour.  As I was looking online for a place to approach the lake, it almost seemed to me that we were not really welcomed to actually visit the lake, and then I found Antelope Island, and Antelope Island State Park on Google Maps.  The map showed an island out in the middle of The Great Salt Lake (GSL), and really no way to get to the island if we didn't have a boat.  There was a state park there though, and I assumed that it would be on the lake.

Kristi agreed that it was a good idea to try to get to the lake somehow and we got in our car and started to drive.  It was a chilly winter day.  No matter, we were determined to see the GSL close up. We drove through town (we were staying in Layton) quite a distance, but it all seemed like the same suburban town, and as we got closer to the lake there were new housing developments, and lots, and lots of shopping.  Then there was a road and a gate, and a guard shack where we were asked for an admission fee, which being seniors (over 62) was $5.  Now, mind you, we still had no idea what the park consisted of.  Once we got past the gate guard we were on a causeway, a lake fill with a road on it and we drove the 7 miles out to Antelope Island.

Once on the island we found a place where there was beach access and walked across a rocky terrain down to the beach where we admired the sun trying to shine through a gray winter sky.  There was sand of a texture that I had not experienced before, and the lake water was calm.  There were snowy mountains on all sides of the lake, and a bison standing on the beach.

The 7 mile causeway was built started in 1967, and finished in 1969.  On the way out the causeway for our first time we saw several hawks hunting in the grasses by the road.  The water was low for much of the way with a snowy beach that extended out quite a ways.  As we got closer to the island the water got higher.  We crossed two bridges on the way out that allowed water to flow from one side of the causeway to the other.

After a short stay on the beach we visited the "visitors center" where we found out a little more about the island.  The island had been a ranch since 1848, and most of the game that was originally on the island had vanished and the native grasses had been destroyed by grazing cattle and sheep.  The state bought the ranch in 1981 and restocked the island with California Bighorn Sheep, and pronghorn antelope,   There has been a bison herd on the island since 1893 when a dozen bison were purchased from one William Glassman by then owners John White, and John Dooly and there has been a Bison herd on the island ever since.  The herd now numbers between 500 and 700.

After the "visitors center" we drove out to the aptly named "Buffalo Point" where we saw our first bison.  There is a nice view from there.  As I said before it was a chilly day, and it was 4 pm when we got there.  By this time it was after 5 pm and the park closes at 6 pm so we were thinking it was time to call it a day.

Our First Bison Sighting

There is a warning at the gate to the park that "Bison may be dangerous".  We didn't get close enough to them for them to be any danger, but I know how powerful wild animals are and have been very careful.

We left the island that first day with the resolve that we would return the next day, which we did.  The next day it was overcast but a bit warmer.  I was determined to see some wildlife, and there was a lot more island to see.  It is 15 miles long, and though the road doesn't go all the way down to the south end of the island, it goes down to the old ranch a little past the middle of the island.  We didn't get too far down the island before we sighted a small herd of bison.  I stopped to take pictures even though they weren't close to the road, and I wasn't set to walk over to them knowing that they can be dangerous.

We drove down the island to Fielding Garr Ranch, established in 1848.  There are a number of buildings on the ranch including the ranch house, built in 1848, and is "the oldest Mormon-built home that is still on its original foundation, in Utah."  There are several pieces of farm machinery around, and a shop with signs on the wall to give you a sense of the history of the place.  Apparently the water levels of the lake allowed people to take wagons, and animals out to the island across the lake sand until 1854 when the waters of the lake were too high and they built a boat to access the island.  There are fresh water springs on the island fed from the hills rising above the lake from the island.

The ranch was sold to various people over the years and was primarily a cattle and horse ranch until 1915 when the owner changed to sheep ranching.  All of this depleted the native vegetation which is currently being restored.  The park is "home to jackrabbits, pronghorn, bobcats, mule deer, coyotes, and several species of rodents. The island and Great Salt Lake attract migrating birds. The inland grasslands on the island provide habitat for chukars, burrowing owls, long-billed curlews and several species of birds of prey"

If you look closely at these pictures you can see where this ranch house has been built onto.  At the very end of the house is a bathroom with a shower and and indoor toilet.  Improvements came slow to the island.  There is documentation describing the introduction of electricity to the island, how they subsisted before there was electricity etc.

Kristi and I lived on the Key Peninsula for 9 years and the history of Key Peninsula is sometimes similar to the history of Antelope Island, although Antelope Island is very much closer to an urban setting than Key Peninsula is.  It is the history of progress coming to the local islands etc. that don't have immediate access to the amenities that are available on the mainland, so visually apparent, but so far away across the water, or through (in the case of Key Pen) the woods.

If this raven turned around you would see a small mouse in his beak.

As we were leaving the Island after our second trip out there we stopped at the first bridge you cross after leaving the island.  I got out of the car and walked along the bridge because I wanted to see just how much water was being allowed to go under the bridge.  I also wanted to take a few pictures.  When I got back to the car Kristi was out of the car carrying her camera.  She had seen a coyote crossing the bridge. [ (from Kristi): Steve had just asked the rhetorical question of whether animals ever make their way from the mainland out to the island on the causeway.  So there was our answer.  This coyote was trotting past our car, right down the center line of the asphalt and tempting fate.  I was fearful of it's safety as a car came along and slowed for it, then followed by an impatient truck-driver.  The coyote survived, apparently by following the shoreline by the causeway.  Here was an example of an animal who decided this life wasn't destined to be home sweet home and was making his exit.]   Driving off of the island we almost ran into a big hawk with about a 4 foot wingspan.

Coyote Alley

Our plans were to go to Pocatello, Idaho after Salt Lake.  We were scheduled to arrive around 5 pm on Wednesday so we had the better part of a day to use before heading up there as it is only about a 2 hour drive to Pocatello.  Both of us decided to make one more trip out to Antelope Island as it was a sunny day and picture taking would be better.  I also was hopeful that we would see more bison, and maybe even some other animals that we hadn't seen before.

Driving out to the island on Wednesday we stopped at the bridge again.  I wanted to take an even better look at the water under the bridge,  The water was a bit murky, but I was able to get a look at some of the plant life, which seemed to have some appeal to me.

We stopped at one point to watch a herd of bison from a distance.  Two sets of the big boys appeared to be having fights over one or two of the girls.  We watched them butt heads repeatedly, follow each other for a few steps and go at it again.  I hope they have hard heads.  It appeared one bison was watching intently from a distance while the rest of the herd walked away; maybe she was the desired one, making her choice.  (Kristi's description of the fighting boy buffalo)

Going onto the island we got a closeup look at some bison.  We took some pictures from the road.  They really didn't pay much attention to us, neither posing, nor going away from us.  They remained intent on feeding themselves.  There must have been some good food there.  We observed some birds that were apparently finding something good to eat on the backs of the bison.

Birds on Bison

I think that part of my fascination with this place is the fact that it has had failed homesteaders, miners, oil wells, cattle, horses, sheep, corporate ownership, church ownership, federal ownership, and now a state park.  It has been torn up, monetized, deserted, and now it is being restored (as much as possible) to it's former natural glory.  I think about the coal air pollution in London, the polluted Thames River, the rivers of the east, and midwest that have been totally polluted and then restored to being, if not cleansed, at least made cleaner.  We drove up to the viewpoint at Buffalo Point, this time to the top and stood for a long while looking out at the vista.  The combination of the mountains on the island, mountains on either side, and the GSL makes for some real beauty.

Kristi asked me what this thing on the Fielding Garr Ranch was:

I found this sign on the wall of the shop.

For a synopsis of island history:  https://stateparks.utah.gov/parks/antelope-island/antelope-island-history/

I hope you enjoyed reading.  Kristi and Steve Nebel

Such a Great Lake

When I was a child my wonderful parents took me and my brother to the Great Salt Lake for a campground stay.  I recall the sulphurous smell, the freakish salty flat ground, and most of all the fun of swimming in buoyant water that seemed to bounce me to the surface without the help of an inflated toy.  In 2006 I made my first return via a commercial airline that landed in Salt Lake City.  The plane took off again in a clear and sunny sky, and flew directly over the long expanse of the great lake in February.  The image remained in my memory of the surreal colors of the lake and it’s surrounding shores.  I recall orange, cobalt blue, aquamarine blue, green, white, yellow, and it occurred to me that these were far from any ordinary colors I associated with lakes in North America.  

Finally I put the pieces of the puzzle that would answer my questions together on this visit to the lake.  The orange is the tall grasses that grow on the shores of the lake.  The yellowish green is the algae distinctive to the minerals in this unique lake that has no water outlet to clean itself.  That also accounts for the unique smell I recognized from my childhood.  The palest blues are various shades of ice, along with the white which is also an accumulation of snow on ice.  

I found it still to be an endlessly wondrous sight to behold.  This time I discovered more that explained some of the geological oddities I observed from the air.  The lake once covered an expanse of land that made the surrounding Wasatch Mountains into islands.  As we drove out of town heading for Pocatello I learned to look into the base of the alluvial fans of the mountains for signs of where the lake had previously been, high up into the hills.  The great Salt Lake once was unimaginably greater, though it’s possible to imagine with the help of the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah.  There you can crank up a pool of water into a tank which is arranged with the sculpted replication in miniature of the Wasatch Mountains, and thus see what it looked like 10 – 20,000 years ago.

Driving out of town I saw one of the alluvial fans scraped bare to harvest gravel for asphalt.  The red rocks were exposed as if the skin had been rubbed off to reveal blood below.  I thought about all the asphalt I take for granted every day and where it came from.  I guess in Washington these visages are protected from the average driver.   And then I thought about Butte, Montana as I saw it from our entry on a clear day driving on the I-90 freeway.  From a distance I saw a vast vista of great hillsides that had been mercilessly blasted to ruination amidst the beauty of their surrounding mountains.  Somehow the shock left a sense of offense within me that left me with the feeling that one of my personal relations had been injuriously and permanently violated.  Now we’ve seen portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Utah as we’ve driven through each, poked, scraped, blasted, pounded, and sucked dry of life with hundreds and thousands of oil drilling, hard rock mining, and fracking stations.  I’ll leave it at that.

Big Wind on the Highways

We were in Rapid City, SD for 5 days.  That's a long time to stay someplace without a conference to attend, or a relative to visit with.  The last day we stayed there I was finally recovered from the cold I'd been carrying around with me and, with Kristi, visited the local shopping mall.  It was just across the street from where we were staying so it wasn't a long journey to get there.  Kristi had already been there.  There's an old saying that I think I acquired from my maternal grandfather, Ben Hart.  "I didn't just ride into town on a load of hay."  or "I think he just rolled into town on a load of hay."  Please excuse me farmers.  We visited a store called "Happy Days".  I looked around a bit and very soon had to think that one had to be some kind of sucker to actually buy something there.

This is only one example.  They had full life mannequins of the "Rat Pack", and I only wish I could remember all of the things we saw there.  There WAS some entertainment value, short lived though it may have been.  The place was full of novelties.

On the other hand we stayed in that shop for about 20 minutes thinking how dumb someone had to be to buy this stuff, at the same time thinking about how an Elvis gas pump would look in the living room.  It was a nice respite off of the hay truck.

 We played at The Firehouse Wine Cellars on Friday night.  We played straight through two hours of music and had the opportunity to play a lot of songs off of our new CD, "Windows".  I had to have a souvenir so I bought a beer mug.  They have The Firehouse Brewery just a couple of doors down from the wine cellars.

In Rawlings, WY I bought a 4 pack of Boddington bitter to go with the mug.  The mug is quite satisfactory for drinking beer.  I guess you could put water in it too.

We hung around the winery for awhile after we played.  They gave us a taste of the wines that they make and I gotta say I was sorely tempted to spring for a bottle of the stuff, but was already well stocked for alcoholic beverages and there's only so much room for stuff in the car etc.

The night before we were watchng the news and they were doing a special story on the South Dakota drought.  Now there's something I hadn't thought about, heard about, knew nada about.  There were a couple of farmers being interviewed and they were talking about how without more water they wouldn't have enough grass to feed their cattle.  It was a sad story of expectations dashed, and dreams cancelled.  One of them was explaining how he couldn't afford another winter paying for out-of-state grass to feed his cattle, and that under the circumstances he was going to have to cut the size of his herd.  It really seemed like a classic example of bad things happening to good people.

Of course as I write this I realize that there are other perspectives.  I've been reading, listening to friends, etc about the inefficiency of using meat as a food source for humans.  Cattle add methane to the atmosphere, and you could grow another crop where the cattle are, and at the very least you could feed a lot of the food that goes to cattle to humans.  There's the shallow version.  On the other hand if you grew up on a farm growing cattle for the beef market, and it's all you know it is still a sad day when you are forced out of business by mother nature.

The next day we were on our way to Rawlings, WY and we decided to take a side trip to Devil's Tower.  We have been blowing through the prairies like a tumbleweed in a hurricane, seeing nothing that you can't see out of a windshield of a vehicle traveling between 65 and 85 mph.

It was about a 50 mile round trip.  Well, kinda round trip as we started in Sundance, WY and ended in Moorcroft, WY.   It was a more exciting experience than I expected it to be.  Perhaps part of it is just the idea that we were going to see something just to go see it.  I had heard about it for years so it was a thrill to see it poking out of the Wyoming landscape from a distance.

I stopped at a few of the viewing opportunities on our way and took pictures as it got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

There weren't very many people living out that way, although I've seen a lot less populated parts of Wyoming by this time.  Kristi and I started to think of the little place along Kluane Lake where we used to stop from time to time on our way to Whitehorse, or Dawson City.  Finally we arrived at the door to the park.  I don't know what I was expecting.  I guess I was expecting I'd be able to just drive up a road and be at the foot of the thing so when the guard asked us if we had a senior pass it was a wakeup.  I had totally forgotten that I had bought the thing, and I don't even remember where I purchased it.  It was one of those deals that you get it now or you don't get it at all so I got it not knowing for sure if I'd ever need it.  It was $20 for under 62 and $10 if you were over 62.  So I'm looking through my wallet, and I don't really see the thing when the gate guard, who was a woman not much younger than me, said, "There it is!".  She was watching the contents of my wallet as I pulled them out.  What a surprise!  That was just when I was thinking I had lost the thing, or had hallucinated the very existence of it.

Once we got inside the park it wasn't too long a drive to the Visitor's Center and we immediately began behaving like proper tourists  We took each other's picture with the tower in back of us.

We went in the Visitor's Center and bought postcards.  We talked to the guy behind the counter who was from Moorcroft and after a life in retail sales thought that this was a pretty good career.  It pleases me to hear that folks are enjoying their lives and the people that they work for are treating them well, so it was a pleasant conversation.  Also when we drove out through Moorcroft I could say I knew someone from there.

These are the last two pictures I took of Devil's Tower.  By the time we got to Rawlings I had all but forgotten about our late morning excursion.

After Devil's Tower we got back on I-90, but pretty soon we were turning off onto a smaller road.  Very soon I saw two eagles on the side of the road dining on coyote carcass.  It was one of those things where you see "something" on the side of the road.  You're unsure just what it is you are viewing because it is not really light enough and maybe there was too much light behind them.  Besides you are driving on a two lane, ice covered road with the snow blowing across it so you're not really paying attention to what's going on elsewhere.  Nonetheless I was able to exclaim to Kristi that she should look and saw the four to six foot wingspan of an eagle taking off as we whizzed by.  We both were kind of in shock and discussed for awhile just what it was we had been seeing.  Then a little farther down the road there was another eagle casually dining on a carcass on the side of the road.  By then I was in a "get where we need to go" mode of travel, but thought about going back for a picture.

The rest of the day was driving, driving, driving stopping only for gasoline and restrooms.  We drove past acres and acres of oil fields and fracking stations.  We speculated on how much the farmers were making off of growing crops or beef, and how much they were making off of oil and gas.  We saw an antelope herd making friends with a herd of cattle.  I wondered if they realized that they were communicating with "food".  I posted this on Facebook and a Facebook friend pointed out that many people see the antelope as "food" as well.  "Give me a home, where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play.  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day."
This got stuck in my head and played over and over and over as we drove through the wild prairies of Wyoming.

It blew all day.  When we got to Rawlings it was still blowing.  The snow was drifting and the motel parking lots were all filled with snow.

Kristi was driving by the time we arrived and we got stuck in the motel parking lot of the first place we tried to check into.  Whoever was supposed to be at the desk was apparently taking a nap and we were tired, cold and impatient.  Even the place where we eventually stayed had snow drifts that we had to break through to get into the parking lot, and then the snow was drifted up to the door of our room so we were tracking in snow.  Pretty normal stuff huh?  OK.

The next day was more relaxed.  You could be tiring of hearing about snow, blowing winds, and tracts of rocks, and grassy plains full of snow by now.  It could seem boring to you.  Believe me, you don't want to get bored when driving through this stuff.  You want to be at your coffee best, watching carefully, keeping your hands on the wheel and the wheels on the road.  Honestly.  We had heard that it was warmer in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake so after Rawlings, WY that was what we set our course for.  I'm not sure I've seen as many trucks on the highway anywhere as we saw between Rock Springs, Wyoming, and Layton, UT.  There were really a lot, and we've seen a lot of trucks so that means a LOT of trucks.  Once again there were times when you couldn't see the surface of the road for the snow blowing over it.  It even started snowing once.

Like I say it was a relatively relaxed day.  We decided to stop in Rock Springs, Wyoming to see if it was really the shithole that we remember it as.  I was optimistic that we were somehow mistaken about our impression of the town.  There was a sign pointing to the "historic" downtown area.

Let me just say that Jesse Kimmerling would probably recognize this town.  It is a petroleum products kind of a place surrounded by mining operations, fracking stations, oil wells etc.  There are also processing plants.  The original housing that Kristi and I remember seeing in the hills surrounding Rock Springs in the summer of 1982 was mostly doublewide trailers.  Now there are prefabricated homes, and I think probably some pretty nice houses.  There is gold in them thar hills.  I'm pretty sure of that.  I think that is the point.  Rock Springs is aptly named.  If there hadn't been snow on the hills all we would have seen would have been mud and rocks.  Hardly anything grows around there.  The historic downtown looks very haphazard.  Here.  I'll put some illustrations in.

Lingeries, Bachellorette Party Supplies, Novelties, Piercing and Tattooing,
Exotic Shoes and Boots

This is the "nice" part of town.  It is the "historic" part of town.  I would play there, but I don't think I want to live there.  My intuition is that if anybody really wanted to live there the town would look a lot nicer than it does.  It's really a big place actually, and this is just a tiny part of it.  The population was over 23,000 in 2016.

Welcome to Utah

It was really  nice to drive into  the  vicinity of Salt Lake City.  We are staying in Layton, just a few miles out of the city.  It is very urban here.  There are spectacular views of mountains all around us here, and the Great Salt Lake is just a few miles away.  We moved into a motel room and immediately set out to see the Great Salt Lake.  We went to Antelope Island State Park.  It is a really nice park immediately adjacent to Layton.  It was after 4 in the afternoon by the time we got there.  The park closes at 6, and the visitor's center closes at 5.  It was Sunday afternoon.

We've had some time to get around town a little bit now.  SLC, Layton, and environs are pretty much another stop along the way.  The same businesses service anything you want to do, and the TV says the same thing it says in other places.  I don't hear much radio around here, but that's OK.  I think I'll have a look at Democracy Now at democracynow.org when I log off of here.  I won't say anything about the possibilities of national theocracy, or when religion holds excessive power in a region (and there a lot of them in this country that have these characteristics). 

At any rate, this is a beautiful locale where there are no people present.  Nothing against people, but I'm more a fan of the natural world than I am of humanity.  Please don't take that personally.  I love people too.  This communication stuff can get downright difficult at times.

Don't let the wind blow you into the snow off the road.  We'll see you soon.  Steve N.