Last Stand at Antelope Island
“Great Salt Lake is an ironical joke of nature — water that is itself more desert than a desert.” - Dale L. Morgan
In 1983, Great Salt Lake rose rapidly due to a 225 percent winter snowpack. By 1986, the lake had risen nearly 12 feet, reaching a historic high of 4,211 feet. The shallow lake slipped up and over her shore, spreading her fingers out into the city, wreaking havoc.
The flooding resulted in millions of dollars of property damage. This is likely the only reason the local government intervened. Certainly not because a nearby bird refuge was going underwater.
For those who called Great Salt Lake home in 1983, this flood was all-encompassing. I, however, was still a decade away from coming into the world at all.
I didn’t know anything about Great Salt Lake until 2012 when I was a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, nearly 2,000 miles from the lake and still several years out from calling the West home.
That year I stumbled into a creative writing class to check off a degree requirement as I fumbled my major. I was burned by the brutality of pre-med and the rigidity of biology. Like most 19-year-olds, I felt so lost in this giant life I could barely catch my breath.
It turned out I loved writing more than I loved most things in this world. I put more effort into that creative writing class than I’d put into any course so far. By the end of the semester, my professor called me into her office to deliver my final grade — an A, easily won — and slid a paperback book across the desk.
“I just have a feeling this is going to help you make a decision about your major,” she said.
The book was Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams and during that unseasonably warm winter day, I found a park bench in the middle of campus and started reading.
Early in Refuge, Williams says, “There are birds you mark your life by.” And this was true. There were birds I marked my life by — the spring robins, the falcon pair who nested on the roof of a campus building. But more so, there were books I marked my life by and this one would become a foundation for nearly everything in my life that followed.
Refuge maps the 1980s flooding of Great Salt Lake and Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge alongside the decline of William’s mother’s health as she battles ovarian cancer. It is a book so carefully crafted around place, legacy, and the natural world that it is difficult to feel like you, the reader, are not also building a personal relationship with the lake, whether you’ve seen it or not. And I had not.
Familiarity with the place didn’t matter. I devoured the book in a matter of days, filling the margins with notes, underlining and starring entire sections in bright red ink. I dog-eared so many pages I may as well have just folded down both top corners of the book. I carried Refuge with me everywhere.
Shortly after my first read-through, I switched my major to environmental studies and added a minor in creative writing. To hell with pre-med. I set my gaze firmly on the West, determined to call those mountains home.
Within four months of graduation, I landed in Boulder, Colorado to begin a Master’s program in environmental journalism. Besides one quick stint in the Pacific Northwest, I haven’t left since.
Now I live nine hours from Great Salt Lake, northeast in Colorado where I am separated from this body of water by more than 500 miles, two mountain ranges, and long expanses of highway. In August 2023, I traveled through the mountains and across the highways to sit at the lake’s shoreline and hold vigil for her evaporating body. The headlines over the prior year had been dire: Great Salt Lake was drying up.
There is no logical reason to make such a long trip when I don’t even call the Great Basin home. And yet because of Refuge, I felt I knew this lake like an old friend. I couldn’t leave her on her deathbed unvisited.
In the months since I returned from that trip, I’ve become immersed in the sticky legalities of Western water rights. To live in the West is to think constantly of water, its scarcity as well as its abundance. Its force by which it tumbles from mountains and runs all the way from the tips of peaks down to the bottom of the sea. Usually.
Sometimes that water runs into what it might imagine is a great salty sea, but is in fact a vast shallow depression in the earth, far from any oceanic shorelines. When this happens, when water collects in this way but never exits to the sea, we call the body of water a “terminal lake.”
Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake because her water will never run to the ocean. But this word, terminal — a word so hard and edged you could almost spit it out of your mouth — could describe the lake in other ways too.
In October 2022, Dr. Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, delivered an obituary for the lake. Like many other concerned residents of the region, she was acutely aware that without immediate intervention, Great Salt Lake would shrivel and die, affecting everyone from the people of Salt Lake to the birds who loved her waters.
“Utah regrets the loss of this unique piece of its identity, as does the lake’s namesake, Salt Lake City,” Dr. Baxter says in the speculative obituary. “The state is still struggling with 7,706 employment casualties when the brine shrimp and salt extraction companies literally dried up. Also, one million tourists no longer visit Utah, since the closure of state and federal lands surrounding Great Salt Lake. With her death, Utahns now pay more for their water treatment, and the ski season is limited to just a few weeks. They also are suffering additional health costs from dust exposure and a spiritual loss of this cultural hub.”
Earlier that year, Dr. Baxter and several other colleagues published an emergency report through Brigham Young University laying out the dire situation Utahns had put the lake in. The lake was 19 feet lower than its natural level. It had lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area. If water use continued at the same rate, the report predicted the lake had only five years before shriveling to a bone-dry alkaline memory and maybe only three years before entering a potentially ecologically unrecoverable low.
So when I say that Great Salt Lake is terminal, I mean her water never reaches the ocean and I also mean she has a known expiration date. But mostly I mean that Utahns and their lawmakers would have to be filled with pure delusion not to see her fate, not to bear witness to her suffering. And I wondered if it was possible to be so disconnected from the land that death and disappearance entirely lost their meaning.
“When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn further into its essence,” Williams writes in the 1990 prologue to Refuge. “In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay.”
In 2022, Great Salt Lake reached a historic low of just 4,190 feet, about eight feet lower than the critical minimum level. This may not sound like much, but for every foot the lake drops, about 44 square miles of lakebed is exposed. The lake has gone from covering more than 3,300 square miles in the 1980s to just 1,000 square miles today.
It’s the extremely short lifespan of five years that has brought me out to Great Salt Lake. Unlike many of the other environmental disasters expected to occur in my lifetime — melting glaciers, disappearing snow, floods and fires — the lake could disappear by the time I am 35. Meaning I will still be a relatively young woman when I stand on her empty shores for the last time or listen to the cloying silence in the absence of the 10 million birds who rely on her waters for nourishment. I will still be paying off the majority of my student loans when the toxic dust, concentrated and exposed to the wind rises up out of the parched basin, smothering Salt Lake City, Ogden, and many other towns nearby — making them mostly unlivable. I will not be given the gift of time to meditate on her disappearance. I must come to understand that grief now.
People are once again saying the birds are gone and like Williams, I am only drawn more to the gasping lake’s essence. Perhaps I am telling this story so that I am not tempted to draw back in the face of the lake’s impending death. Perhaps this is my attempt to stay.
“I have been in retreat,” Williams closes the prologue. “This story is my return.”
In early August 2023, I drove to Antelope Island State Park outside of Syracuse, Utah where I hoped to sit next to the lake and say goodbye. I wouldn’t call this a pessimistic act, but rather a means to offer what little justice I could before it was too late.
Over the last decade, I returned to Refuge again and again as a sort of life guide. Like an oracle deck, I’d flip to a random page and ask the book for guidance. It never failed to deliver. But in all that time, I had not re-read its entirety. Much to my surprise Williams had recently recorded the audiobook in her own voice and filled the end with an afterward to meet the past four decades from the original publication. It seemed like a perfect prelude to this trip to listen to the book again on my journey to the lake.
As I drove down I-80, I spoke aloud entire passages word-for-word, not realizing how much of the book I had committed to memory in my sporadic passage recitation over the years. Tears filled my eyes. If the lake disappeared, what would I have left to pin my life to?
Despite calling the West home on and off for the last eight years, I had only been to Great Salt Lake once, and even then, it was only because I was passing through. I had never made an intentional trip to the lake itself because I thought I had time. Because until last year, I didn’t even know she was slipping away. Because I had other beauties and crises of my own to occupy my mind. Now I felt as though I’d gotten that dreaded call — if I didn’t hurry, I would miss my chance to say goodbye.
I barely registered the nine-hour drive, I was so engrossed in the audiobook. By 4pm, I pulled up to the entrance booth at Antelope Island, suddenly itching to stretch my legs. A long, straight land bridge reached from Syracuse to the island, wide with pull-offs, both sides of the road running a thick bike lane. The expansive view should have melted my heart with its liquid, mirrored surface. But as far as I could see, there was no water at all. Just cracked white salt flats flaking like burned skin.
At the ticket booth, a park ranger handed me a map and a thin green tag to place on my rearview mirror that showed I would be camping on the island for the next three nights.
“Did you come out here for the Perseid Meteor Shower?” she asked me.
“Not exactly,” I said. “But I’m glad it overlapped with this trip.” I glanced at the dry lake bed extending from both sides of the road. “This is pretty sad,” I added. “I was out here three years ago and the lake came right up to the road.”
The ranger craned her neck, looking out the booth window as if noticing the lake level for the first time.
“It’s nothing compared to last year’s record low,” she said. “The lake always bounces back.”
She waved me forward and I drove slowly across the pavement, wincing at the cracked earth where lake once stood. The air was thick with sulfur and the scent of decay. I drove for a while longer, getting most of the way across the bridge before finally encountering water. I stopped the car and stood on the edge of the road, watching the first glimpse of shorebirds pecking at the salty mud beneath the thin veneer of water.
There was a definitive line where lake began and cracked salt flats ended. I thought perhaps if I looked with enough intensity that I might see the slow backward retreat of the lake, inching further and further from her shores. If I had a multitude of patience, could I witness some of Great Salt Lake’s final breaths?
The Ladyfinger Campsite extended off a rocky jut into the lake, the campsites themselves sitting on the hillside, built out into reasonably flat, terraced squares just big enough for a tent and a camp chair.
By the time I hauled all my gear from the car down to my site, I was drenched in sweat, August perhaps not the best time to visit the desert. I positioned my folding chair in the thin shadow cast by my tent and slouched down low, trying to capture slivers of shade.
When the sun finally slipped down toward the horizon a few hours later, I followed a narrow sand path to the edge of the lake — or rather, what used to be the edge of the lake. Because the lake level was so low, hundreds of feet of soft mud extended like low tide into the lakebed before finally touching water.
The brine flies hummed in clouds so large I could feel the breath of their wings blowing over my calves as they drifted just inches above the sand. The birds were in a frenzy with the sudden burst of insect activity. Bats emerged, nighthawks began their dizzying dives, and the sky turned a deep pink, the hue of fluorescent cotton candy.
I stood at the water’s edge, feet sinking beneath the sandy mud, until the mosquitos munched my ankles nearly down to bone. I shuffled back up to my tent, stripped down to my underwear, and lay belly down on my synthetic sleeping pad, sweating against the plastic. As darkness crept across the campsite, I flipped to my back, watching the night sky through the mesh roof of my tent, searching for meteors. At that moment, I caught a glimpse of something odd drifting far above the earth. A string of green lights in a steady stream swimming through the emerging stars. Inquisitive voices erupted from the other campsites nearby.
“Are you seeing this too?” I heard someone ask a few campsites over.
“It looks like a plane banner? I think?” A woman said back.
I couldn’t help myself. I let my mind drift to thoughts of aliens. I thought, No one will ever believe me. I gazed at the swimming lights through the lens of my phone to unsurprisingly find it was impossible to make out what I was seeing. I could only take a picture so grainy I’d surely be lumped in with the rest of the kooks who knew they saw something.
Then, one campsite over, I heard someone mention SpaceX, a string of satellites recently launched by Elon Musk — and all that magic died. The green train of lights curved across the sky and disappeared out of sight. These were a train of 60 satellites, but SpaceX intends to launch thousands in the next couple of years. Astronomers fear they will obliterate our view of the cosmos.
Night descended, blacker, deeper, and suddenly the zipping fireballs of the meteor shower whizzed every few minutes across the sky. The campsite hushed, little gasps bursting out simultaneously as each sporadic meteor blazed in a streak of red or green between the stars. Not aliens, but still something to marvel at. Here we were, collective witnesses to the still-visible vibrant cosmos above our heads as well as mourners of a dying lake shriveling below, pinned like butterflies, stuck between two worlds.
The next morning, I left Antelope Island early, temperature already climbing into the 90s, and drove to the foothills of the Wasatch Range outside of Ogden. The Bonneville Shoreline Trail loomed above me in the scree, winding under oak trees glued precariously to the side of the mountain. Eventually — when land disputes are worked out —the trail will run 280 miles along the eastern edge of the ghostly shoreline, but right now only manages to carve a path along a discontinuous 100 miles of ancient lake.
Lake Bonneville once covered nearly half of Utah (including what is now Great Salt Lake) and it seemed reasonable that walking some of this long-gone shoreline might help me envision what it could be like to walk the shoreline of Great Salt Lake if she becomes nothing more than desert.
When humans first encountered Great Salt Lake about 13,000 years ago, she resembled a body of water similar to what we see today (minus the dramatically shrinking size). And so her width, depth, and boundaries became known. This is the lake.
A local Shoshone tribe, the Western Goshute, referred to the lake as Pi'a-pa, meaning "big water," or Ti'tsa-pa, meaning "bad water." Exactly when and which white settlers named it Great Salt Lake is up for debate, but the point stands that for thousands and thousands of years, this salty, shallow lake remained relatively unchanged.
However, history, like time, does not have definite beginnings and endings. It flows continuously like a river. 50,000 years ago during the ice ages of the Pleistocene Epoch, the climate looked much different from the present day. Much wetter. Much cooler.
In this more distant past, an eruption in Idaho created a diversion that forced Bear River to separate from its connection to the Snake River and Columbia River and instead move south where it drained into the Bonneville Basin.
Over time, Bear River filled the Bonneville Basin, creating a lake reaching 5,200 feet above sea level and delving at least 1,000 feet deep. You can still find hints of this massive ghost lake today in the rounded water-worn rocks scattered along the higher elevations of Antelope Island (lovingly named Nipple Hill). In a way, this is Great Salt Lake’s origin story.
Lake Bonneville loomed large at nearly 20,000 square miles for thousands of years. But about 15,000 years ago, erosion, seismic activity, or some other disruptive event caused a naturally forming rock dam in Red Rock Pass, Idaho to collapse, causing a massive flooding event. 380 cubic miles of water rushed across Idaho, Oregon, and even up into Washington. The flood itself only lasted a few days, but swelled the Snake River for more than a year, while dropping Lake Bonneville more than 350 feet.
Still, even that drop didn’t take the lake down to its current Great Salt Lake level. It took another 2,000 years or so as the Pleistocene Ice Age receded up the continent, and the climate warmed and dried that Lake Bonneville shrunk to the relative size we know today. The climate settled into more of a stable rhythm and the lake held its position for the next 13,000 years.
In this way, Great Salt Lake is Lake Bonneville, just by a newer name. And despite thousands of years of shifting shorelines, we could wipe out her history in half a decade.
I climbed up into the foothills, gaining elevation over the town. The trail followed a contour line about halfway up the mountain, running along its side like a thin shelf. I walked the path slowly, looking out into the basin periodically to remind myself that not so long ago (geologically speaking), this depression in the earth would have been entirely filled by the freshwater of Lake Bonneville. In the distance, I saw Great Salt Lake, almost able to make out my campsite, a brown hill of dirt resting on the liquid horizon.
After several hours of walking along the trail, I spotted a metal bench on a rocky outcrop high above the city below. I took a seat and reached out my hands as if to splash my face with the ethereal ghost water. 15,000 years ago, I would have been standing on her shore. Ogden, Salt Lake City, and most certainly my campsite on Antelope Island would have all been under water. I tried to inhale the imagined aroma of a muddy bank, but mostly smelled exhaust and the muted must of dusty air.
Surrounding me were the clear-cut lines of two stone “benches” etched along the contours of the Wasatch, one slightly higher than the other showing the 90-degree angles of past shorelines where Lake Bonneville eroded the stone. Like pencil lines on the wall marking a child’s growth over time, the mountains marked the steady changes of an untamable lake.
Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is one of the main characters of Refuge. It is a pillar, a marker, “a constant,” as Williams calls it. “The birds and I share a natural history,” she says. “It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.”
Bear River is also one of the main characters in the grand story of Great Salt Lake. Just as Lake Bonneville came to its gloriously high level from Bear River, so does Great Salt Lake rely on this river for more than half of its water supply (along with the Jordan, Ogden, and Weber Rivers). They too are fused. Bear River is the largest river in North America that does not reach the ocean. Instead, it reaches Great Salt Lake where it wields incredible power to shape the landscape. Despite this enormous power, Bear River’s water barely makes it to Great Salt Lake anymore.
Utah has the cheapest municipal water rates in the country and unsurprisingly, Utah’s municipal water customers use the most water per capita in the U.S. Despite being a state comprised of 33 percent desert and receiving less than 11 inches of rain a year, the average person doesn’t notice their own wastefulness until their bank statement reflects it. There’s no financial reason for Utahns not to waste water.
Wandering around Ogden and Salt Lake City, I was surprised to see a plethora of bright green lawns, towering trees, and glimmering turquoise swimming pools. At one point, I saw a sprinkler system running at 2pm in the direct heat of the day and wondered if the water even made it to the grass before evaporating into the sweltering atmosphere. The story in my head was forming: These wasteful assholes will be the death of Great Salt Lake just to get another year with a green lawn.
This is exactly what agricultural water lobbyists hope you’ll think. Even though I knew better, I’d fallen for the trap. While it pains me to see water poured out into a desert just for aesthetics, the reality is that household water use in Utah accounts for just 8 percent of all the water (municipal water use makes up another 7 percent). Meanwhile, agriculture uses up 85 percent of the water, with 68 percent coming from just a single crop: alfalfa.
Scientists estimate Utah will need to cut 30 - 50 percent of its water usage to save Great Salt Lake. So even if every single resident stopped using water altogether, they would barely put a dent in the water usage issue. Lawns — if annoying — are not the problem.
Alfalfa, on the other hand, poses an existential risk to the state. This specific breed of hay grows best when both days and nights stay fairly warm and when the crop is flooded. It’s not that there are just a lot more alfalfa farmers in Utah compared to other crops; it’s that alfalfa takes a metric fuck ton of water to grow. Because Utah has altered the landscape enough to meet these unlikely conditions, the state grows some of the finest grade alfalfa in the country — grade A to be exact.
About a third of that alfalfa gets shipped overseas to China and the Middle East to feed dairy operations, meaning Utah exports more than 325 billion gallons of water each year from a state dying of dehydration. The rest stays mostly local to feed livestock.
Despite growing some of the finest alfalfa, the roughly 9,300 alfalfa farmers in Utah make up just .2 percent of the state’s GDP, only grossing about $500 million a year — an amount on par with amusement park revenue. Meanwhile, Great Salt Lake alone supports $1.3 billion in economic output, not to mention the $8.1 billion GDP the outdoor industry contributes to the state every year — an industry that would be greatly affected by a disappearing lake. Dollar for dollar, there’s not much of an argument to be made for protecting the alfalfa industry.
It’s true that alfalfa has some benefits for the land. It’s a nitrogen fixer and only needs to be replanted once or twice a decade. It improves soil health, requires little to no fertilizer, and runs a deep 15-foot taproot into the earth, holding soil in place and helping to recharge the aquifer.
However, the environmental and public health crisis that would emerge if Great Salt Lake dried up would far outweigh the soil benefits alfalfa provides. One of the major health threats from a disappearing Great Salt Lake is dust blowing off the dried-up lake bed. Nearly all waterways carry trace amounts of naturally occurring heavy metals and toxins like lead and arsenic, but those often remain so diluted as to be nearly imperceptible. However, in Great Salt Lake, those heavy metals and toxins have nowhere to go, and when the water evaporates — as it must since it can’t run to the ocean — it leaves behind deposits of these dissolved particles in the lakebed. As the lake bed dries and becomes exposed to wind and weather, that toxic dust aerosolizes, making the necessary act of breathing within 50 miles or more of the lake incredibly dangerous. Studies are already showing that chronic exposure to this dust laced with neurotoxins directly leads to terminal neurological conditions like ALS.
Eighty-five percent of Utah’s population — more than 2 million people — live within 15 miles of the Wasatch Range, making up the Wasatch Front. Should the lake dry up, scientists predict much of this region will become unlivable.
I have to wonder if it’s worth sustaining our romantic notion of Utah agriculture at the expense of the entire Wasatch Front. The farmers might not even survive that kind of economic downturn anyway. Without Great Salt Lake, the state would quite literally crumble.
However, while it feels good to point fingers directly at the alfalfa farmers, they’re not entirely to blame for getting the state into this situation. Utah’s 19th century “use it or lose it” water laws reward farmers for using as much of their water allotment as possible, and punish those who don’t. Meaning if you don’t use all the water you’ve been allotted, the state will give that water to someone else — creating unnecessary scarcity and promoting wasteful water practices.
In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune in March 2023, Keith Bailey, son of Tom Bailey — the most successful alfalfa producer in Utah who runs Bailey Farms International — said to the reporter, “It is true that alfalfa uses most of Utah’s water, but cut all the alfalfa out, now what are you going to do with Utah’s water that’s going to be economically beneficial?”
Those kinds of statements — which are so disconnected from the complexity of the landscapes the people making them rely on — can only arise from a system hell-bent on brainwashing its people into believing it could be true. That water could be economically beneficial left in the river never occurs to someone brought up in this system.
There is some legislation arising that could allow farmers to use less of their water without risking their water rights, but because the state doesn’t even have a comprehensive way to measure how much water individual farmers are using, that legislation would be unlikely to fix the problem. And with only five years before the lake is totally dry (and even less before the lake gets so low it may reach a point of no return ecologically) it’s hard not to target alfalfa farmers in the search for a solution.
We need nuance, and the lake also needs a solution immediately.
At the edge of the cliffside on the Bonneville Shoreline trail, I sat on a park bench with my eyes closed, trying to picture this depression filled with water. Suddenly, I heard splashing and kids shouting. I blinked my eyes open expecting to see the landscape transformed. Instead, I saw below in the midst of industrial suburbia a public pool, opened for the day, kids racing across the concrete pool deck, jumping into the turquoise water. I turned around and walked back to my car.
A few days later, I found myself seated in the cool air conditioning of Dr. Baxter’s office in the Medrum Science Center of Westminster University which houses the Great Salt Lake Institute.
She welcomed me with excitement into her office which was pleasantly crowded with books and wildlife posters as well as a toaster oven spilling crumbs which she apologized for. “I was making bagels and tea for the students,” she said. I identified her quickly as the kind of professor I would have clung to like a beacon in undergrad.
I told her I was camped out on Antelope Island and she shook her head. “Antelope Island was a little bit mad Max last year. It was freaky in that it hasn't been like that in recorded history,” she said. “So to see it this year after this immense amount of snow, it made me smile because the brine flies were back. The shorebirds were back. It didn't feel like this dead place like it did last year.” I started to understand why the park ranger had seemed optimistic about the lake’s current levels.
“What that tells me,” she continued, “Is that if we can get water to the lake, it will respond. It will recover as long as we can do it soon.”
It feels like such a simple statement, “Get water to the lake,” and yet its actual complexity is maddening.
The fate of Great Salt Lake, given the major water diversions, comes as no surprise. We’ve known precisely how this scenario would play out for more than 100 years. In the 1880s, geologist Grove Karl Gilbert predicted Great Salt Lake’s impending disappearance.
“Increasing diversion of [Great Salt Lake’s] affluent waters for purposes of irrigation could have no other outcome…Antelope Island and Stansbury Islands would become permanently united with the mainland; the greater part of Bear River Bay and Farmington Bay would become dry; the deltas of the Bear and Weber would join near Fremont Island, and the lake would make its last stand in the central depression west of Antelope Island.”
Even with this historical knowledge, there are still people proposing Utah take preposterous measures like damming Bear River, ensuring even less water reaches Great Salt Lake. In 2021, Linda Townes Cook, public information manager for the Jordan Valley water conservancy district said that the Bear River is, “a pretty cool river and one of the last ones that’s not damned [sic]. We don’t want to develop it. It’d be great if we didn’t have to, but it’s our job to make sure there’s enough water for people.”
The original article published by City Journals misspelled “dammed” for its darker cousin “damned” — a Freudian slip, if you will — of what the river and lake actually stand to become should Bear River be modified.
“What do you think will happen to the Institute if the lake dries up?” I asked Dr. Baxter, feeling as though I was asking what a person would do if their loved one died.
“Oh, you mean here?” she said, gesturing around to the room we sat in. “I don’t know,” she said and paused. “I think I have embedded in me a sense of optimism. And a lot of that comes from the fact that so many people in so many stakeholder groups are invested in saving the lake.”
I thought immediately about the $60 million West Desert Pumping Station constructed rapidly and brought online in April 1987, pumping 8 trillion gallons of water into the desert over two years to control the historic flooding. It is possible to implement solutions quickly. But perhaps only at the threat of millions of dollars of property damage. It’s also true that the pump was quickly taken offline when the region was hit with a drought and the lake levels subsided on their own. I wonder if that temperamentality of the lake has made lawmakers wary of pouring more money into its management.
“In the end, you must take the lake on its own terms,” says Dale L. Morgan in his 1947 natural history of Great Salt Lake. “Refractory, obstinate, not to everyone’s taste. Self-preoccupied, often sullen of mood, yet on occasion, yielding itself up with an abandoned beauty that only the desert knows, it is a lake fit for a desert land.”
In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams says, “Maybe it is not the darkness we fear most, but the silences contained within the darkness. Maybe it is not the absence of the moon that frightens us, but the absence of what we expect to be there.”
I drove the long flat road east to Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge wondering what absence would frighten me. I expected there to be thousands of birds. I’d read that single-day records could top 100,000 birds. It has been 35 years since Williams drove to a nearly unrecoverable flooded Refuge. Now, I drove to it so withered it was barely recognizable as marshland at all.
I followed the gravel loop, seeing a handful of birds here and there, poking through what remained of the reeds and bulrushes. But I had no reference point for what I should be seeing, for what had already been lost. I didn’t know how badly I should be frightened.
What I did know was this: More than 10 million birds of at least 388 different species utilize Great Salt Lake including some of the largest populations of shorebirds — like Wilson’s Phalaropes — in the world. The Great Salt Lake ecoregion is a critical part of the Pacific Flyway, servicing migrating birds from as far south as Tierra del Fuego and as far north as the Arctic. The health of Great Salt Lake, in many ways, cannot be disentangled from the health of the world.
What I saw on this hot August afternoon was haze on the horizon, a far-reaching white field of alkaline salts where water should have been, and then, finally, the lake eking over the cracked earth to meet the river. This was where the birds congregated.
In the absence of water, brine flies, brine shrimp, and a place to safely rest, no one really knows what might happen to the 10 million birds who rely on Great Salt Lake. But the loss is bound to be far-reaching. The ecosystem impacts will extend far beyond Great Salt Lake, far beyond Utah, and even farther beyond the U.S.
In a scoping report released in September 2023 for Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, the top threats to the Refuge included: “Water, climate change, invasive species, ignorance, and politics at every level.”
However, not a single one of the 20 comments submitted mentioned changing practices around alfalfa, farming, or agriculture as potential solutions to the Refuge’s problems. Instead, the comments were littered with calls for better bathrooms, better viewing platforms, and better hunting access. As though Bear River’s water problems didn’t exist at all.
Parked on the edge of the gravel road, I tried with all my might to feel the magic of this place that Williams had so convinced me of. But something about the heavy heat weighing down my limbs and the looming knowledge that all of this could be gone in a couple of years made my stomach turn. All of this “wasted” water that by some miracle was never trapped in the lines of agricultural production. What lay before me, rippling between the marsh grass, was holy water.
I stepped to the water’s edge and crouched down at its shore, cupping the wetland into my palms, rubbing the warm, brackish water up and down my arms, searching for a blessing.
That night, the Ogden Astronomical Society arrived on the island to make an event of the Perseid meteor shower. I changed out of my sweat-stained, dust-soaked clothes into slightly less sweat-stained, dust-soaked clothes and made my way to their event space in a massive gravel parking lot.
I boldly assumed that these science lovers would be eager to share their concerns about Great Salt Lake. An event like this couldn’t even happen without the lake, right? As I struck up conversations, I quickly realized I’d entered a political minefield. The men, fiddling with their telescopes, all clammed up.
“Oh, I dunno,” a white-haired, mustachioed man said to me as I politely gazed through his telescope pointed at the sun. “The lake rises and falls. That’s just what it does. I don’t think there’s a need for all this hullabaloo.”
I cornered a young couple that clearly didn't want to speak with me. I saw them camped one site below mine over the last two days, struggling with their equipment — attempting to shove a huge air mattress into a tiny tent.
They told me, holding hands, that they had just gotten married and that this was a honeymoon of sorts, though they officially moved to Salt Lake City from Michigan just a few weeks ago. They were both astrophysicists, they said, though they didn’t look a day over 23.
“What do you think you’ll do if the lake dries up?” I asked, bluntly. They looked at each other nervously, clearly waiting for the other to answer. Finally, the wife said, “We’d probably just go back to Michigan.” They eagerly scooted away from me, unphased.
I changed tactics and walked up to a more approachable-looking man fiddling with his telescope. He invited me to peer down into the eyepiece and I climbed up onto a metal folding stool to reach the height of the scope.
“You should be able to see the wisps of flames coming off the surface of the sun,” he said. I tilted my head, but saw only black. He adjusted the eyepiece. “Now?” he asked. I looked again but still saw nothing. He scooted me off the ladder and peered into the eyepiece himself, made another adjustment and said, “Ah, right there.” He ushered me back onto the stool and I looked in, still seeing only black.
“Wow,” I said, noticing the line forming behind me, though I still didn’t see it. “That’s amazing.” He looked skeptical and I lost faith that my act was particularly convincing. I stepped out of the way and let a small child take my place. The man adjusted the eyepiece again and I asked, “What do you think will happen to events like this if Great Salt Lake dries up?” I asked it softly, trying to sound more curious than questioning.
“Oh well,” he said, “It’s not going to be good.” He paused to glance around at the crowd forming. “I work in air quality in Ogden,” he finally said and I heard his tone shift from conversation to prepared statement. He said something about the situation being bad but that he was certain they were going to find a solution. I thanked him and walked back to my picnic blanket, disappointed.
Night fell slowly and I laid against the sharp gravel, sliding my noise canceling headphones over my ears to drown out the hundreds of people filling the parking lot. Children raced between telescopes, making the scientists nervous. Meteors streaked across the sky, once every few minutes, sending the crowd into an uproar. I could only manage the chaotic energy for an hour before I craved the solitude of my tent.
I wandered back across the island and added a little more air to my sleeping pad before putting on the epilogue to Refuge, an article Williams had written for the New York Times earlier that March. In her wonderful, deep voice I heard her say, “If Great Salt Lake is in retreat, perhaps she is holding her breath, as do we who worry about her prognosis. To retreat, to withdraw momentarily to garner strength and perspective, can be a strategy. Retreat can be a conscious action: a period of time called for to pray and study quietly, to think carefully and regain one’s composure. I have not thought about the retreat of Great Salt Lake as a position one could take: to commit to a different way of being, to change one’s beliefs.”
I heard Williams addressing her own prologue — the conflict of it. If she had been in retreat and writing Refuge was her return, then what now, nearly 40 years later, was her relationship to the lake? Active retreat seemed to be the important modifier. My own commitment to sit with the lake in what I worried could be her final years felt like the opposite of retreat, instead an attempt to stifle the urge to look away, something I felt most Utahns were doing. But perhaps retreat is not turning our gaze to more pleasant things. It is instead setting our gaze so firmly on the thing we love that all we can do is think of it.
I splayed out half-naked across my sleeping mat, mosquitos bonking into the mesh above my face, the thinnest of breezes blowing over my tent. Another meteor passed overhead and I held my breath. Below me across the mud flats, Great Salt Lake held her breath too. Together we retreated against the blazing night sky.
By 7am, the sun was already screaming into my tent. I scrambled for the zipper before I baked alive. Breakfast was a rushed blur, oatmeal thrown into lukewarm water, half-chewed, and swallowed hard. Right then, I decided to drive to the city and take air-conditioned refuge in the Utah Museum of Natural History. There was still so much to see on Antelope Island, but I would flake dry and blow away if I spent one more day beneath the ceaseless sun.
In just over an hour, I was inside the immensely refreshing air-conditioned building, immediately greeted by a sea of children crowding around booths. A woman approached me and put a white paper cup into my hand.
“Free barbecue crickets,” she said. “For Bugfest.” She gestured to the posters and booths spread out across the main floor, all laden with bugs, bug toys, bug cards, and bug jewelry. Hundreds of people showed up at the museum for the event. I passed the cup back to her.
“Maybe later,” I said, still digesting my barely-chewed oatmeal. “It’s a little early for barbecue.”
I hurried past the booths where people were waving me over to participate in various bug activities — and even though I’d been alone since leaving Colorado, I craved more solitude. I rushed to the top floor and entered the nearly silent Native Voices exhibit, letting the glass door close behind me with a whoosh. The din of the main floor muted. From the overhead speakers I heard a voice say, “If you’re not part of the land, to me, you’re lost.”
That stopped me. Pulled me out of the chaos of my own head. I thought of the alfalfa farmers who I imagine believe are part of the land — more than the urbanites of Salt Lake City at least. That’s the narrative that keeps playing out in the media: agrarians vs the city slickers. But what is mass monocropping and over-irrigating if not corporatization of the land?
In a different wing, I wandered into a brightly lit room surrounded by windows. There were tables scattered over the carpet, each filled with cases of neatly pinned bugs. An eager college student wearing a long, black leather trench coat with a museum badge clipped to her front pocket approached me. She began her spiel about the bugs in the cases before we’d made eye contact.
I admired her excitement, even if it was overwhelming. I told her I also worked in a natural history museum in college, trying to make a connection. “Section of birds,” I said. “And herpetology.” She did not seem interested in this information in the slightest and instead ushered me over to a case of butterflies.
“See the blue?” she said, pointing to a couple dozen Amazonian blue morpho butterflies. “There’s actually no pigment in their wings. The blue doesn’t really exist. It’s a clear, diamond-shaped scale that reflects the light making it appear blue, which is why it has an iridescent quality to it.” She paused, leaning over the case of butterflies, assessing each one.
“Most of the blue in nature doesn’t actually exist,” she said. “It’s all a trick of the light.”
From the long glass windows, I could see Great Salt Lake on the horizon, which looked blue in the distance. In this way, she was a ghost, a trick of the light, a body already becoming memory.
I left the bugs and wandered to the Basin and Range exhibit, briefly overhearing a couple’s conversation.
“I’m not even saying you have to stop farming,” the woman said, waving her arms, looking exasperated. “Just stop farming the most water-intensive crop. Stop farming alfalfa.”
I nearly reached out my hand to stop her. To look her straight in the face. To touch her. But I let them pass unbothered.
The Great Salt Lake exhibit was just a small corner of the museum which opened to a giant floor map tracing the various shorelines of the lake from modern times back to Lake Bonneville.
I walked the Bonneville shoreline first, finding the small section where I hiked the day prior, dodging kids poking at brine flies and shrimp set out on folding tables around the room. Then I stepped toward the center of the room, tracing the tiniest circle of the 2022 Great Salt Lake shoreline, the year she nearly disappeared.
Plastic pelicans, snow geese, and other shorebirds hung from the ceiling, dangling on clear fishing lines, swaying in artificial flight. I watched their wings tremble and wondered if this floor map might become a sort of gravestone in the next few years. I sat on a bench and watched as dozens of people passed, not one bothering to look down.
It should not have come as a surprise that this floor map was one of Dr. Baxter’s creations. This was also the same museum where Williams worked one of her first jobs, which had inspired me to take up my own curatorial assistant position in Pittsburgh during undergrad. The web of our connections seemed practically visible.
Later, Dr. Baxter confirmed just how strangely intertwined we were, telling me that when she was coming to Salt Lake City to interview for this position, someone in her yoga class handed her a book and said, “Oh, you’re traveling to Salt Lake City? You really need to read this book.” The book slipped into her hands was Refuge.
“And so I started reading it on the plane,” Dr. Baxter said. “This was my first introduction to Great Salt Lake because I'd never been to Utah. I'd never seen it. My first introduction was through Terry Tempest Williams’ words.”
Both of us here, mourning the lake because someone put Refuge serendipitously into our hands.
Near the end of the museum, I was struck by a quote painted on the wall by geoscientist Paul S. Martin. “Most of the Western Hemisphere’s charismatic large mammals no longer exist,” it read. “As a result, without knowing it, Americans live in a land of ghosts.”
Williams’ memoir is a book of ghosts. The shimmering mirage of Great Salt Lake beyond the tall glass windows was nothing more than an alkaline memory. I was abruptly aware that I was all too alive in the land of ghosts.
Later that afternoon, I drove back to Antelope Island, head buzzing. As I crested the rise in the pavement leading to my campsite, I knew that I was staring down one of my last chances to put my body into Great Salt Lake. I walked to the beach which stretched for nearly half a mile before connecting with the lake and limped over the burning hot sand to the water’s edge.
The clouds of brine flies grew denser, like murmurations of starlings, never rising more than an inch or two off the ground. I waded through them into the water and they parted as a school of fish parts for a meandering shark. A few seagulls stood at the water’s edge running through the clouds of flies, beaks open, swallowing as much as their small bodies could hold.
The water was shockingly warm. Almost hot. It burned the open cuts and raw bug bites that covered my legs. I winced as the floating clumps of dead brine shrimp brushed my shins, like decomposing fingers.
It took 15 minutes of walking straight out into the lake before I was waist deep. Even though I donned tight black yoga shorts, I could feel the flotsam of brine shrimp finding their way into every crack and crevice (which means exactly what you think it does). The lake was filled with shrimp, floating like self-propelling, disembodied feathers, carving lazy circles through the water as the hawks carved the skies above.
I took my plunge, leaning back into the water, feet immediately rising above my head, the extreme buoyancy momentarily threatening to flip me onto my stomach.
I wobbled like that on the surface of the lake for more than an hour, watching the sun trail across the sky. I tightened into a little ball, exhaled aggressively, and still nothing could sink my body beneath the first few inches of water.
A few dozen feet over, an older couple were also wading in. We were some of the last people in the lake, the sun getting closer and closer to the tops of the mountains. I watched as the man leaned back, arms wide, splashing into the water.
“I’m floating! I’m actually floating!” He called to the woman who stood near him, contemplating the brine shrimp. “It’s just like everyone said.”
He laughed and splashed then lay on his back, looking up at the sky. Then his laughter turned to little sobs. “Isn’t it amazing?” he said to no one in particular, his voice breaking.
And then I was crying too. I was holding vigil for Great Salt Lake. We all were, weren’t we? Who knew if we would have the opportunity to do this again before she became a desiccated puddle? I couldn’t stop myself from saying goodbye.
“Please hang on just a little bit longer,” I whispered to her. She held me in her wet arms as I wept. The sky glowed orange and pink, the water turned a fantastic shade of indigo. Great Salt Lake was in retreat. I hoped this was the promise of her return.
