July 12
Heading out towards Antelope Island State Park, UT, our drive continued through the Snake River Plain. A large flat plain between Idaho’s mountains to the north and south. This landscape, when not immediately adjacent to the river, is generally barren, dreary and dry with sagebrush and not much else.
We decided to take a quick detour to the EBR-I Atomic Museum National Historic Landmark that is located 46 miles from Craters of the Moon on Hwy 20/26. We drove by it coming in and considered adding it to our itinerary if we had the time. Since Liam is really interested in nuclear science and chemistry, we took a self-guided tour through the facility for about an hour. EBR-I was the first nuclear reactor used to create electrical power in December, 1951. A small group of scientists and engineers split atoms to make electricity, using slide rules and chalkboards. We saw four nuclear reactors, including two aircraft nuclear propulsion prototypes (that never took off), a reactor control room, remote handling devices for radioactive materials, safety features, etc. The site was decommissioned in 1964. A sign mentioned a crude procedure for stopping an overheating nuclear reaction at a plant in Chicago. A technician using an axe could cut a rope that suspended control rods, allowing them to drop between the fission rods, stopping fission immediately.
Most of the remaining drive was on I-15 south. We had a great cell signal that allowed Esther to get caught up on all her picture uploading.
After about 260 miles and 6 hours (including our EBR-I detour), we crossed the 7-mile causeway over the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island, the lake’s largest island. Great Salt Lake, the largest natural lake west of the Mississippi, is the remains of ancient Lake Bonneville. Water flows into Great Salt Lake from four rivers which carry millions of tons of minerals into the lake every year. Great Salt Lake has no outlet so water evaporation makes the lake extremely high in mineral content and salty. The salinity is roughly 6-8 times that of the oceans. No fish can survive in the lake, only some algae, brine shrimp, and brine flies, and which are a primary food source for the millions of migrating birds.
Antelope Island, 15 miles long by 4.5 miles wide, is mostly a treeless, sagebrush covered, hilly landscape. Its highest point, Frary Peak is at 6596 ft in elevation. The southern 2/3 of Antelope Island has some of the oldest rock on earth, at 1.7 billion years old, while the northern 1/3 has 550 million year old quarzite and tufa, the youngest rock at 10,000 to 15,000 years old. Tufa looks a lot like concrete with lots of pebbles cemented together. Forty natural fresh water springs support the pronghorn bison, mule deer, bighorn sheep, coyote, bobcat, and many other animal populations.
After stopping at the visitor center, we found our camping site at Bridger Bay Campground. Eager to test our bouyancy in the salty water, we put on our bathing suits, drove the short distance to Bridger Bay, and walked the considerable distance over crusty, dry sand out to the water line. We had heard about the swarms of brine flies. They flew up in buzzing, black clouds as we approached and promptly landed again. Thankfully they don’t bite. We saw many people recording this spectacle, running hunched over across the beach and through the flies, shooting videos. That alone was entertaining.
We entered the water which is shallow for at least a half mile out. The smell was pretty strong as the shore doesn’t get the cleaning action of tides and waves as the ocean shore does. Everything rots in place under the baking sun. We noticed the brine shrimp in the water. They are small pinkish critters that propel themselves with what look like a hundred legs in a wavelike motion. In some areas they are very thick in the water column. Then we also noticed all the other darker floating things, zillions of brine fly parts, empty brine fly pupae, and who knows what else. They were more numerous than even the shrimp! This didn’t deter the boys who had great fun floating and playing in the water. We told them to just not get any water in their mouths. Esther and William never went deeper than their thighs, preferring not to get bugs and shrimp all over.
Great Salt Lake has a unique feature in its Oolitic sand. It is made up of small round grains formed by concentric layers of aragonite (calcium carbonate) which coat mineral grains or brine shrimp fecal pellets, similar to how pearls form in an oyster. The boys thought it was funny that we were walking on and playing in eons of shrimp poop.
After a round of pay showers, we relaxed at the campground. As it got duskier, the animals started coming out. We saw a lone coyote running across the beach, cottontails and jackrabbits, and mule deer. We had a rare small tree next to our site that must have been a nightly roosting place for large, blue dragonflies. They swarmed in from all around like a cloud of fairies.. It was quite a show. The sunset was amazing. During the night we heard the howling of coyotes.
July 13
We awoke to a dark sky and some rain so we got a later start. We drove up to the Buffalo Point trail head for a quick view then continued down the only road to the southern part of the island. Fielding Garr Ranch was an interesting stop. This ranch was the first permanent residence on the island in 1848. The ranch raised cattle, horses, sheep, depending on the profitability of the current market.
We originally planned to hike the 6.6 mile roundtrip up to Frary Peak but decided to take the shorter 2.8 mile hike up to Dooly Knob. We stopped before the peak, satisfied with the simultaneous view of both sides of the island. There was a lone male bison nearby.
The rest of the afternoon we relaxed at the campground. The boys walked back down to the water’s edge to check out something big on the beach. They reported that is was an old, rusty, spherical buoy, covered in millions of flies.
After dinner we walked along the beach then uphill across tufa rock and through sagebrush to part of the Lake Side Trail near the campground. We unanimously agreed that the beach smelled very strongly of a pit toilet on a bad day, and we have come across some bad pit toilets in our travels. As suspected, the coyote made his nightly run across the beach, but turned around when he saw us up on the trail. Unfortunately, it was too windy for the dragonfly show. Again we had an awesome sunset and the coyotes howling during the night.
The Davids' Cross-Country Trip 