Great Salt Lake

The Great Salt Lake is what remains of Lake Bonneville, an enormous freshwater lake that filled much of western Utah during the last Ice Age, in places over a thousand feet deep. When the climate warmed, most of that water evaporated, leaving this salty remnant in the lowest part of the basin. You can still trace the old shorelines of Bonneville as level benches cut into the surrounding mountains, high above the present lake.

Because the lake has no river carrying water out to the sea, everything that flows in stays, and the water leaves only as vapor, leaving its dissolved minerals behind. That is why the lake grows steadily saltier and why its level swings so widely with the wet and dry years, spreading across huge flats when it is high and pulling far back when it is low.

Almost no fish can live in water this salty, but the lake is far from empty. Its shallows teem with brine shrimp, small enough to hold in a spoonful of water yet present in staggering numbers, along with clouds of brine flies along the shore. Those small lives are the engine of the whole ecosystem, and brine shrimp eggs are even harvested here as a global commodity to feed fish and shrimp farms.

Feeding on that abundance are the birds, and they are the lake's true glory. Millions of them, avocets, stilts, phalaropes, pelicans, gulls, and vast rafts of eared grebes, gather on the lake during migration, some traveling from the far ends of the hemisphere. For many species it is a critical staging ground, and the sight of them wheeling over the water in their thousands is one of the great spectacles of the West.

Islands rise from the shallow water across the lake, the largest of them Antelope Island, roamed by a free-ranging herd of bison and reachable by causeway, along with others that shelter nesting pelicans and other birds. As the lake drops, some islands become peninsulas, joined to the shore by exposed lakebed, another sign of the changing water.

The lake lies within the ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Ute, Goshute, and Paiute peoples, who lived around its marshes and gathered its resources for thousands of years and whose descendants remain in Utah today. After Mormon settlers reached the valley in 1847, the lake became a landmark and a playground, ringed for a time by grand bathing resorts where visitors floated in the buoyant salt water.

In recent decades the Great Salt Lake has fallen to record low levels as more of the water that once fed it is diverted upstream, and drought has deepened the loss. The retreating water exposes broad flats of dry lakebed that can blow as dust, threatens the birds and brine shrimp that depend on the shallows, and has become one of Utah's most urgent environmental concerns. Standing at the shore, you can often see just how far the water has pulled back.

Spring and fall are the best times to visit, mild and alive with migrating birds, while summer brings heat, brine flies, and sometimes a strong lake smell on still days. Winter is quiet and stark, the flats sometimes frosted white. In any season the lake rewards those who come to its shores at sunset, when the light pours across the water and the whole vast, strange sea seems to catch fire.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.