Tag Archive: Great Salt Lake

Saltair Train Car 502 – Great Salt Lake – Utah

Saltair Train Car 502 - Great Salt Lake - Utah

The abandoned Salt Lake Garfield & Western Railroad Car 502 sits on in the desert grasslands that surround the Great Salt Lake outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. Also known as the Saltair Train, in its heyday, the train car ferried passengers back and forth between the old Saltair resort that stands on the edge of the lake.

Beginning in 1893, the Saltair Resort went through at least 3 different incarnations. The latest one, began with the construction of new facility out of an old military hanger in 1981. However the unpredictable water levels of the Great Salt Lake which went from flooding the new building shortly after it opened, to leaving the venue a significant distance from the edge of the lake, caused the resort to be abandoned for much of the last four decades. But in recent times, it has become a location for smaller, independent music concerts.

Observation Tower – Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve – Utah

Observation Tower - Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve - Utah

An observation tower at the Great Salt Lake Shoreline Preserve for birders to observe water fowl, and raptors. The Great Salt Lake Shoreline Preserve covers 4,400 acress of wetlands, and upland habitat along the eastern side of the Great Salt Lake. It helps support waterfowl, raptors, and migratory shorebirds. During the spring and fall more than 4-6 million migratory birds visit the Great Salt Lake on their way to their summer and winter habitat. Some travel as far as the Arctic in the summer, while others venture to Central and South America during the winter months. The Preserve is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy, and is north of Salt Lake City off of I-80.

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Bonneville Salt Flats at Dusk – Utah

Bonneville Salt Flats at Dusk - Utah

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The Bonneville Salt Flats are part of the lake bed of Lake Bonneville. Lake Bonneville, the result of cooler temperatures and higher precipitation during the Late Pleistocene, was the largest of four deep water lakes to exist in the Great Basin over the last 800,000 years. At its greatest extent 18,000 years ago, the lake was more than 980 feet deep, and covered over 20,000 square miles, nearly the size of Lake Michigan. While the lake receded from its maximum extent over thousands of years, one particular event, the Bonneville Flood has been documented in the geologic record, when an alluvial dam on Marsh creek, part of the drainage of the Snake River, was finally breached by rising lake levels. This released over the course of a year, more than 1,200 cu mi of water into the Snake River, and lowered the lake more than 430 feet.

The lake was named after Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, an officer in the US military, fur trapper, and explorer of the American West. The largest extant remnants of the lake today are the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake and Sevier Lake.