Wednesday, July 04, 2007

The Great Salt Lake, Or A Whole New Level Of Disgusting

My college friend Lucy came into town to visit, and she wanted to go check out the Great Salt Lake. I hadn't been to see it either, and so we grabbed some aqua socks and tan lotion and headed out.

The easiest place to actually get to the lake itself is right behind the Great Saltair, which you'll remember is the low-rent concrete crater in which I saw Evanescence last fall. That's it right there with the Kremlin-tops. One of the times the Saltair burned down was when it actually flooded first, then fell over and then burned down, so the water is fairly close... it depends on how much of the lake is evaporated. How a building can burn when it's waterlogged with saline is indicative of the luck of this building. Anyway, there was about a hundred yards of salt flat to cover between the Saltair and the water this time. This is important because salt flats reek.
Let me put this in perspective. When I was in basic training, they had these latrines that were permanent structures built over a deep trough, and instead of ever cleaning them, they would just dump enough disinfectant in them to keep them from starting a plague or become sentient. And those places were decades old. We used to put on our gas masks to go in them. Those masks keep out nuclear and biological agents, and we could still smell the rank stink of privates past.
The Great Salt Lake makes those places smell like lilies.
It was a quick hundred yard dash trying to outrun the smell. About halfway there, we got to the brine flies. These things are very small, harmless, and number in the quadrimegazillions. They take off en masse as you near them, and you can actually hear them when they do it... not the buzz of wings, but the sudden movement of thousands of bodies. Like a tiny breeze... amazing in a minute way. And they taste bad, by the way. Here's a picture of them laying seige to a pair of footprints. That's not radioactive salt stink making the shot pink... there was something up with the camera setting.

And here they are making a poor dog wish he was dead.

The water was warm when we got to it, and blessedly stink-free. And shallow... I think I've read that the lake is thirty feet at its deepest point. The sand is rippled and the color of sand on the surface, but when you pick your foot up, there's a plume of deep black. Lucy, having been mostly insane since I've known her, delighted in smearing black sand-mud all over her arms and howling. And the flies stayed mostly on land, so we had a respite to contemplate the sole residents of the lake, brine shrimp... more commonly known as sea monkeys.
Chances are you've never seen a living sea monkey. Well, let me be more academic (superior)... brine shrimp are what you call cryptobiological, meaning they can stay dormant for long stretches of time in inhospitable environments. So, chances are you never saw a moving sea monkey... it was alive, it was just bored. Here in their native environment, they are wiggly as all unreason, and number even more than the flies. It was really kind of icky.

The whole deal with the lake being a 'salt' lake is its salinity. It's got so much salt in it that you are supposed to be unable to sink. When I moved here and heard that, I made up my mind to go experience that for myself. Well, out in it, surrounded by flies, wigglies, and stink, I was not overly motivated to move forward in that regard.
We reveled in the ick for a few more minutes, and then slogged back to shore. After a reek-evading reverse hundred yard dash, we hit the showers. Or, more precisely, the showers hit us; they were those beach kind of showers, and they were amped up to the 'firehose' setting. I actually opted to keep most of the mud on me because I wanted to keep the skin it was on.
So now I've been to the Great Salt Lake, which is really something you have to do if you're going to become a Utahn, I think. But to quote Lucy, "It was satisfyingly disappointing, wasn't it?"

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