The Great Salt Lake is Great in that it’s huge, and even huger prehistorically, when it spanned the Eastern half of current-day Utah. It’s also really flat, covered with tiny flies, and stinky due to one of its other two aquatic lifeforms, anerobic bacteria. Brine shrimp round out the water fauna trio.

Interpretive signs, and there are lots, point out that brine shrimp and brine flies draw migrating birds in their multitudes, and I imagine those might be nice to see, especially while wearing breathing apparatus. Boats offer to take visitors on a trip where one can float effortlessly, so my husband decided to try that from the shore, but ended up just wading, because it was “not really deep enough and kind of gross.”

The word “gross” had occurred to me before he brought it up. Approaching the shore, one crosses a beach composed of oolitic “sand,” which comes not from rocks but from biomass, and I just described the local bio types sourcing mass. It’s unpleasant on three counts: color, odor, and texture. Following that is deep black mud, which engulfed my husband’s legs halfway up his calves.

I noticed five interpretive signs I had missed outside the visitor center, and they turned out to be about the large copper mine just over the highway. GSL is a no-exit terminus for water and its associated mineral load, which is not just salt; the world’s largest open-pit copper mine/manmade excavation are here. Plus several smaller ones. So we can add tailings and mine sludge to the local attractions list.

To complete that list of amenities, I will mention wasps, spiders, heavy machinery, pelting sun with no shade escapes, and 30-square foot gravel lots for RVs. No plants? Well, maybe some scrub. I don’t really remember any.

Speaking of plants, the mountains here and in most of Nevada look to be made of dirt or rock and are mostly bare of trees, but can be quite majestic nonetheless, at least the ones that aren’t being used for industrial purposes. However, the wonderland of geo-sculpted formations and canyons that comprise four of Utah’s five national parks, as well as its fabulous ski resorts, are not near here. Maybe we’ll see some on the way out tomorrow.