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.