The Great Salt Lake IS Great!

So, I've been needing to catch up for a while now, but I've been trying my best to make myself busy. I've taken over 300 hundred pictures in the last few weeks, some of them turned out decent, so here goes....

A few weeks ago I went on a quick kayak trip that started at Antelope Island. My purpose was to try and capture what's awesome about the lake. A few fun facts about the Great Salt Lake:

• The Great Salt Lake is the largest lake west of the Mississippi River, it is 75 miles long and 35 miles wide.
• GSL is a remnant of Lake Bonneville, which burst through Red Rock Pass (which I've been to) 14,000 - 15,000 years ago, because of a "...catastrophic failure of an alluviul fan." Before it drained, Bonneville was up to 1,000 feet deep. You can still see the former shoreline if you look at the foothills of the Wasatch Front (you can even hike it in some places). GSL is much smaller, and only about 30 feet deep. It lies in a very flat basin, so fluctuations in depth, due to climatic variability, produce very large changes in the area the lake covers.
  
• It is very salty, even hyper-saline. This makes it so very few species can survive there. However, before you write it off as a dead lake, there are some kick ass organisms in that water. They include algae with potential medicinal properties and brine shrimp (also known as 'sea monkeys'). There are also a lot of brine flies that feed off this ecosystem (really, billions of brine flies), which in turn are a major food supply for migratory birds. And migratory birds are awesome.
  
• 75% of Utah's wetlands border the Great Salt Lake, and provide a critical stopover for internationally important migratory bird species.
  
• When the mud on the bottom of the lake is exposed, it smells very bad. When the wind blows across the lake, it brings lake stink to nearby communities. I find this endearing. When I smell sulfur-y type places I think of home (not actually a fact, as much as an observation). GSL is also responsible for the "lake effect" which drives the "greatest snow of earth" machine.
  
• The Great Salt Lake is awesome (that is a fact).
  

I was hoping to be able to see some birds on my trip, and I did see a whole ton of Eared grebes.
But the best views were of the sunset. My first and only stop was Eggshell Island, a rocky little piece of land just off the northern tip of Antelope Island. Every spring tons of gulls nest there, but there are sometimes cormorants and other shorebird species there. Here's what I saw:

The glow of the sunset made my kayak (the Rhombus) look really good.

There were some remnant nests.

Some with non-traditional nesting materials.
I paddled away as the sun was setting, and it did some wonderful, technicolor-type things to the lake.
And, I was recently turned on to a program called AutoStitch, it rocks. I tried to capture the whole horizon here. Is it just me, or do mountains with red skies behind them make anyone else think of Mordor?

I got home very salty, but very excited about what I've seen. I highly recommend everyone visit the lake and take a look at it from water level, it really gives an amazing perspective.