Great Salt Lake
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.
We left Ft. Bridger and hurried along to Salt Lake City.
I was physically feeling the elevation at this point, sleepy and cranky and the air was…thinner. I wondered if Mary Ann noticed since her elevation changes along the journey were much more gradual than mine.
This part of the trip definitely looked physically harder than anything we’d passed of yet.
And even though it was the end of May, look what we saw:
It made me feel afraid to see it. Even though I had no reason to be. I guess I was thinking about how she saw this too, right before they were about to cross the mountains. And how it must have scared her father.
Anyway.
The Graves family met up with the Donner Party just after leaving Ft. Bridger. They joined their ranks in time to help hack away at the Wasatch mountains and eventually tumble out beside the Great Salt Lake.
It’s hard to know exactly where they approached the lake. But my family decided to drive out to Antelope Island to view the lake from there.
We had a really nice time hiking around for a while. It was too cold to think about getting in the lake and also, even the “accessible” parts of the lake weren’t that accessible. (It was quite a walk from the “beach” to the water. Maybe the lake’s levels are down? I don’t know.)
But we saw lots of lovely plants and animals. (Bison! Pronghorns!)
Up next: Great Salt Desert!