Breathe Taking Moments on Antelope Island

Day 2 of my Great Salt Lake Spectacular was an Antelope Island Adventure!  The whole day was an emotional and enlightening experience that I was able to capture while I was trapped in my tent by a lightning storm.  While this trip happened more than a month ago, the discussion of planning has struck me as particularly relevant to current issues with both life and vacation planning.  Turns out I'm no good at planning and prefer to be adaptable, but that isn't fair to others when going on vacation or wending your way through life.  There also some revelations about the moments that were missing from my day to day life.  Here were my thoughts while trapped in my storm-battered tent -

I did not intend to be hunkered down in my tent before 9 pm, hoping not to be struck by lightning, but that seems to be the plan the weather gods had in mind.  A few times today I tried to finish the phrase "the best laid plans of mice and men..." but I don't know how it ends and I don't have well laid plans.  I have adaptable plans.  Today, for example, I was originally going to hike Mt. Ogden, then Frary Peak.  Yesterday while I was hiking down Box Elder Peak, looking forward to chilling next to the Spiral Jetty, I decided an exclusive Antelope Island day was in order.  I juggled around plans for the day and kept to 1) hike Frary Peak, 2) kayak, 3) take pictures of the sunset.  But #2 was cut short by rumors of 90 mph winds in Wendover and #3 was hastily ended after a thunderstorm rolled through.  But its been a good day.

Here's the thing I've been discovering this trip: it is absolutely vital to have moments that make you stop and say "How great/lucky is it that I'm here experiencing this awesome thing?"  Its the question I ask Brent at the top of our coolest climbs.  Its what I asked myself yesterday on Box Elder Peak when I caught a view of Bear River Bay and met a 50-60 year old man who was hiking unconventional routes up and down the Wellvilles.  I stopped everything and questioned my luck when I had the Spiral Jetty to myself for an hour.  Then this morning I found some new-for-me plant species on the beach and got to do some profoundly awesome outdoor yoga under a cottonwood tree.  I howled, head and shoulders back, at the top of a mountain I had all to myself.  I was timid at first, ca-ca-ing and howling quietly, but the greatness of the beautiful, lonely landscape required multiple, soulful howls.  I got to kayak with Phalaropes, they were so many of them it sounded like the wind when they all took off flying.  I saw a sunset in colors I could not capture with my camera, but cannot forget.  And I saw lightning in spider web patterns that I had never seen.

Turns out the saying goes "the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry."  Which is appropriate.  This whole trip opened my eyes to the importance of "Oh My Goodness" moments, which are generally missing from everyday work, but easy to attain while running or hiking or biking or even just eating a good meal.  Below is a list of Oh My Goodness Moments from my day on Antelope Island, along with a few fun facts.

• I saw a some new and old plant species on the beach at Willard Bay 

Mystery Sedge.  Sedges form the genus Carex, which is large and difficult to identify.  Fun fact: Googling "round sedge, Utah, lake shore" does not turn up pictures of this sedge so I don't know what it is.  

Schoenoplectus maritimus - alkali bulrush.  This is one of my favorite plants and is an important habitat species in wetlands around GSL.  Alkali bulrush can tolerate pH as high as 9.0 and water depths up to 1 meter.  It is considered a pioneering species, one of the first species to colonize disturbed areas.   

Cyperus esculentus - yellow nutsedge.  This plant is considered a weed in many parts of the country, but I haven't seen it in any of my field sites, so I was excited to see it.  In parts of Spain the tubers of this species (which is clearly widespread) are used to spice Horchata.

• I had an unexpected chat with my mom and dad - it's always nice to talk to my folks.  

• I howled on top of Frary Peak

Frary Peak is the tallest point on Antelope Island at 6,596 feet.  Fun fact - this is the only jumping picture I was able to make work during my entire GSL Spectacular.  

This is all that is left of Farmington Bay right now.  Snowpacks in 2012 were 30-40% of normal, 2012 was 75% of normal.  If we don't shake this drought I won't be able to finish my PhD, so do your snow dances!

The gneiss of the Farmington Canyon formation on the southern 2/3 of Antelope Island are some of the oldest in the state at 1.7 billion years old; this formation has been referred to as Utah's Pre Cambrian "basement" rock.  

I was very happy to be there.  

While the island as a whole is quite dry, there are more than 40 isolated freshwater springs that support wildlife populations, primarily on the eastern side of the island. And the shifting shorelines of GSL also provide habitat for wildlife as halophytes (like those I talked about last week) colonize exposed mudflats.  

• I ate Humble Pie when I remembered laughing at Scott on the "Mordor" section of Frary Peak

During a trip to Frary Peak a few years ago (documented here), I made fun of Scotty because he was scared of the height and drop off of the steep part of the trail.  But when I was there by myself I found it equally scary.  It was humbling.  

And just like that trip a few years ago, I stopped to pose with this tree.  Fires come through the island regularly and are an important part of balancing competition between grasses and trees.  

• I tried trail running photography with an SLR camera.  

Much of the trail was relatively flat and relatively flat trails are made for trail running. 

Running with a large camera looks like this.  

Then I stopped running because I didn't want to trip and fall with my big camera.  

• I floated with Phalaropes

Before I got to the Phalaropes I passed an antelope.  There are about 230 pronghorn antelopes on the island, it's pretty great to see them.  

12 bison were brought to the island in 1893 and produce what might be the oldest and largest publicly owned herd in the country.  This herd has a unique allele not found in other herds in North America.  The herd is rounded up each year, and the year I saw it was a kind of traumatic event for me.  

Gulls hanging out on dikes around the marina.  Most gulls on the rookeries around the island are either first year juveniles or mature adults; immature gulls usually fly west to mature and then fly back to the GSL to breed.  

Phalaropes are long-range migrants and when they stop by GSL they enter a hyperphagic state where they eat so many brine shrimp and brine flies they gain up to 50% of their body weight.  Oddly enough, studies of stomach contents suggest females prefer brine shrimp and males prefer brine flies.   

500,000 phalaropes, about 1/3 of the world's population, stage at GSL.  And when they fly away it sounds like gusting wind and it's awesome.    

Eared grebes also enjoy feasting on the salty goodness of GSL.  Over 2.5 million grebes visit every year, which at times is half the North American population.  

• I thought "There is no way I'm going to be stuck in a ducky in a microburst storm."  

As I got ready to launch from the marina, the manager told me there were 90 mph winds in Wendover so I should be careful.  I spent the whole time looking for dark water where winds were causing the water to mix.  I didn't see any, but I did spend the whole time tracking the clouds trying to figure out if I was going to get swamped.  

Microburst storms happen when large thunderstorm clouds create temperature stratification in the atmosphere and subsequently huge down drafts.  They're pretty scary and awesome.  Those clouds on the horizon did signify a coming storm, but it took a few hours.  

Duckies are pretty great for toodling around GSL, but I've had some bad experiences with wind and didn't think an inflatable raft would really stand up to microburst winds.  

• I learned about oolites.  

The white sand beaches and dunes are composed of oolitic sand.  Oolids are brine shrimp fecal pellets surrounded by concentric ring of calcium carbonate.  

Ooid particles are rolled around by waves on the bottom of the lake until they form into larger round and egg-shaped particles that make the sand quite slippery.  

And here's a brine shrimp, the organism responsible for both the high concentrations of grebes and phalaropes and the oolitic sand!  

• I viewed the sunset, met new people, and fled a thunderstorm.  

I love GSL sunsets!  So I took lots of pictures, which I really enjoyed because the clouds were being so dramatic.  

It was a particularly great sunset because I could see Box Elder Peak from my vantage point, it's that point in the center the sun if focused on.  

The colors got more intense the lower the sun got, and I didn't notice a storm coming in fast from the south.  Once I got done taking pictures I had to run as fast as I could across the slippery oolitic sand, hoping the tripod I was carrying did not enhance my odds of being struck by lightning.  

• I threw a rock in my tent to hold it down.    

I was very impressed by how well the tent held up, and once the storm passed I had a nice night there.  

Spiral Jetty - Salt

I have said many times that the Great Salt Lake is the greatest and here I'm going to try to make the case for that.  My PhD work focuses on the fresh and brackish parts of the lake, but the really salty parts are what make it so cool.  Stop # 2 on my August Great Salt Lake (GSL) Spectacular was the Spiral Jetty.  This was my fourth trip to the Jetty, and each time I go the Lake and the Jetty look different.  The focus of this trip was to capture the sunset, so there are many pictures of that.

Best sunsets on the planet are found at the Great Salt Lake.  

However, pictures of the sunset are not terribly interesting, or at least not as interesting as the science of the GSL.  So I've decided to use the pictures to guide, in general, my list of reasons the Great Salt Lake is truly the Greatest!    

This move is meant to demonstrate the greatness of the Great Salt Lake and the awesome-ness of chilling out on the Spiral Jetty.  

1.  History - As I mentioned in my last post, GSL is all the remains of Lake Bonneville.  Lake Bonneville drained quite a bit when an ice dam at Red Rock Pass failed, but what really lead to it's transformation into a hyper-saline terminal lake was a change in climate from pluvial (extended period (thousands of years) of abundant rainfall) to semi-arid (evaporation rates exceed rainfall rates).  Lake Bonneville was huge, so massive it actually caused the earth's crust to flex into a depression under the lake.  As rainfall decreased, so did inflow from rivers, lowering the level of the lake past any potential outlet points.  The longer the climate remained dry the lower lake levels fell and the more concentrated minerals in the water became because rivers kept bringing in salts but as water evaporated it left the salts behind.  [Super fun fact - layers of sediments exposed by gravel pits have been one way geologists continue to learn about the history of Lake Bonneville.]

View south from Rozel Point - the terraces on the mountains around GSL are evidence of the shifting water levels of pluvial Lake Bonneville.  

2. Dynamic hydrology - As if a history as a gigantic lake was wasn't enough of an interesting hydrologic dynamic, the lake level is still changing all the time.  In the last 150 years, the Lake's depth has fluctuated by 7 meters (about 23 feet); however, because the lake bottom is so flat and shallow (mean water depth is 5.5 meters (17.4 ft)), that change in water depth translates to the surface area doubling between the lowest and highest water levels.  This means the location of the shoreline can change every year depending on the snowpack and seasonally as evaporation rates rise and fall.  Shifting shorelines have been troublesome in flood years, and during drought years it means you have to hike a long ways to get from the beach to the water.  But it also has an important role in ecology - when freshwater marshes are flooded with hyper-saline waters it re-starts the successional process, essentially setting the plant community back to what it was decades before.  And when mud flats are exposed during drought years they end up being super-tasty buffets for shorebirds who love bugs.

Those dark patches are "craterlets" of oil exposed by low water.  There are actually natural oil seeps at Rozel Point, but oil extraction proved unprofitable due to the sulfur-rich nature of the oil and the difficulties of pumping under both flooded and dry conditions.  

I have no idea what these large metal spheres are, but I see them frequently around GSL.  I really like that someone drew an alien on this guy.  

3.  Halophytes - Birds migrate in and out of GSL when food is most abundant, but there are plants, bugs, and plankton that not only stick around GSL, they thrive there.  They're called halophytes and they are able to live and reproduce under salt conditions that would make other plants and bugs wither up and die.  My favorite halophyte is a plant called pickleweed (Sarcocornia utahensis), not only is it adorable, it concentrates salt in it's tissues so it can be used to pickle things in your kitchen.  Outside the marshes, in the open water of GSL, brine shrimp (Artemia salina and some others) and brine flies (mostly Ephydra cineria) live in water more than 3x saltier than the ocean.  Birds love this highly productive food source (the shrimp and flies), and fish would love it too if they could live in such salty waters; since they can't, brine shrimp cysts are harvested every year and shipped across the country to aqua-culture facilities.  In the places saltier than the main body of the Lake, like the North Arm of GSL, the water is completely saturated with salt and only bacteria and cyanophytes can live.  These organisms are not only cool because of their ability to survive harsh environments, but also because they turn the water pink.  Even cooler, cyanobacteria are part of the oldest kingdom of living things on earth and mostly likely contributed enough oxygen to the atmosphere billions of years ago to create the oxygen-rich, breathable atmosphere we have now. 

Very shallow, salty and pink water of the North Arm.  This vivid landscape was an inspiration to the creator of the Spiral Jetty.  

New salt crust - the salt forming process also ended up being an inspiration for the Spiral Jetty.  

4.  Minerals - It should be clear by now that salts are an important characteristic of the Lake.  Turns out, every year more than 2 million metric tons of minerals are removed from GSL.  Using solar evaporation ponds -where salty water is pumped into very shallow ponds and allowed to evaporate, thus concentrating the minerals in the water and some more complicated refinement techniques - companies are able to extract sodium chloride, magnesium chloride and potash (sulfate of potassium) from the Lake for many interesting, occasionally surprising uses.  Magnesium chloride can be used a dust suppressant, and  can also be further processed into magnesium metal and chlorine gas; unfortunately this process is highly polluting and one of the mineral companies on the Lake is the biggest polluter in the State because of it.  Potash is used as a fertilizer and I can't find many fun facts about it, but I think it's cool that a lake whose water is useless for farming produces a product necessary for large scale farming. 

The high concentrations of minerals petrify wood placed in GSL water, but those high concentrations are also what make mineral extraction profitable.  

 Table salt (sodium chloride) is processed for industrial use and livestock salt licks, but a good chunk of it is also used to de-ice roadways in Utah, which leads me to my next subject... 

Older salt crusts... I guess it's not so much a crust...  Mmm.  Salt art.  

5.  The GSL weather - It's hard for me to pull the way GSL affects the weather on the Wasatch Front from the way GSL is affected by the weather, but I'll give it a try.  First is my favorite - Lake Effect Snow: because of it's elevated salinity, the GSL doesn't freeze in the winter.  This open water creates a kind of "hot spot" with lower pressure than the surrounding cold air; when large cold air fronts converge with this warm air it produces snow storms that drop several inches of snow over the communities near the Lake (including Clinton, where I'm from).  Then trucks full of GSL salt come around in an effort to keep the roads dry through the same freezing-point depression principal that keeps the Lake from freezing.  Wind is a pretty big deal around GSL, too.  Because the Lake is so large and flat, wind can really pick up speed across the water, and it kind of picks up water along with it.  Storm seiches around the Lake can lead to 2-foot differences in the water surface between one end of the lake and the other as wind pushes water ahead of it, and then the water sloshes back.  This in turn has led to trouble demarcating the shoreline that already fluctuates a great deal.  Finally, there are micro-burst storms that bring INTENSE winds with them, but I'll go into that in more detail in a future post (where I discuss how scary GSL micro-burst storms can be while running across the sand with a metal tripod). 

Storm clouds followed me around my GSL Spectacular, which made for an infinitely better (read: scarier) experience.  

6.  The Spiral Jetty - The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork created by Robert Smithson in 1970, composed of 1500 feet of rocks from the shoreline that were moved with bulldozers into the mud in the shape of a counter-clockwise spiral.  While that seems awfully permanent, Smithson actually intended for the work to be inundated and exposed over the course of time and hoped that salt crusts would form on the rock to change the way it looks.  I'll end with a quote from Smithson and the recommendation that everyone take the time to visit the Jetty while it's above water.  The road to get there has been improved significantly and the feeling of walking on the Jetty can't really be explained but should definitely be experienced.  The hour I spent by myself hanging out on the Jetty was pretty great, but I highly recommend visiting with a friend, an artist friend if you can.  

"Through the vaporous abstraction of Box Elder County, Utah, I beheld a wide expanse of lake, whose waters were so bloody a hue as to bring to my mind a geography of unspeakable carnage.  Yet at the same time, a voluptuous color prevailed.  A luminous languor coupled with a foreboding sense of menace produced gyratory dimension.  Innumerable spirals flashed from the lake, assuming no distinct or definite existence, but instead whirled off into burning distances.  There are times when the water flows like scarlet syrup, and times when it faces into colorlessness.  (Robert Smithson)"

August 2013

August 2013

August 2013

Oil Seep - Rozel Point - April 2010

Storms coming into the Jetty - April 2010

Ever present storm clouds - October 2010

Note - my Places to Go, Things to Do page has the coordinates to the Spiral Jetty that can be used to make yourself a map to get there.  Other directions also exist on the Internet, so go and see it (and remember that there is no cell phone coverage out there).  

And if you're in the mood for a read about the Great Salt Lake, check out this book - http://ugspub.nr.utah.gov/publications/dnr/GSL2002.pdf