Great Salt Desert
Last spring, I had the good fortune to retrace the steps of the Donner Party. This post is part of the story of my journey. If you want to begin at the beginning, go here first. Big thanks to the Indiana Arts Council for helping to make this happen.
I was really, really excited to see the Great Salt Lake Desert. Because even though I’d read a lot about it and seen photos online, nothing can beat feeling that salt with my own hands, right?
And this part of the journey was so treacherous for the Donner Party. They thought it would take them 2-3 days to cross the flats. It took them twice that. And so they were out of water, out of food for the animals, parched, desperate. It was truly a horrible ordeal. It was so hot during the day that they described the ground bubbling up with heat under the top layer of salt. Wheels were getting stuck. Many wagons were abandoned here.
Our view from the car was mostly this. Big stretch of white. Mountains in the distance. Nothing else. Seriously. It was the strangest sight I’d seen. Deserts have life usually, scraggly plants and rocks and life breaking up the visual landscape.
These salt flats did not. It looked a little like I envision the moon might look. Like if I ran off onto the salt and left my footprints behind, they’d still be there for years to come. Nothing would come along and disturb it. Nothing would come along at all.
So many people had pulled over to leave their mark—spelling their names or words with great black rocks or making designs with broken bottles in the sand. And I totally get why they were doing that. This land looked like a giant white canvas, begging for someone to mark it somehow.
When the sun hit it just right, it would glisten.
It was white flat meeting blue sky. It was beautiful.
And I was realy excited to get to the end of it, where I’d read there would be a rest stop with a great place to walk out onto the salt and see it up close.
We got there. Eventually.
And it was…surprisingly disappointing.
This is the view from the rest stop. Notice the reflection of the mountains? That’s because it was…covered in water. The salt flats were covered in water. Not very desert-y, right?
I don’t know why. Or why it was just this part of the flats. I sort of wanted to turn back around and go back to pull over on the side of the road and feel the dry part. But I didn’t think anyone else in the van would tolerate that. So we didn’t.
Instead, we got out and took some really lovely photos and felt the salt for ourselves.
Not exactly the way it looked and felt when the Graves family was trudging through. But it is beautiful and I’m glad I got to see it.
For the next post in this series, go here.