POINTS OF INTEREST IN THE GREAT SALT LAKE DESERT REGION A Center for Land Use Interpretation Guide POINTS OF INTEREST IN THE GREAT SALT LAKE DESERT REGION A Center for Land Use Interpretation Guide ISBN 0-9650962-6-2 Written by Matthew Coolidge Edited by Sarah Simons Map by Steve Rowell Printed by Triage Bindery This book originated as the catalog for an exhibit entitled Around Wendover: An Examination of the Anthropic Landscape of the Great Salt Lake Desert Region on display at the Center's exhibit facilities in Wendover, Utah in 1996. Updated edition, 2004 Published in association with the American Land Museum, Wendover The Center for Land Use InterpretationInterpretation is a nonprofit research organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived. CLUI Western States OfficeOffice 9331 Venice Boulevard Culver City, California 90232 www.clui.org On the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, the horizon dissolves into the sky, the earth blends with the heavens, and the Spiral Jetty, in the foreground, lies encrusted and submerged in the fluctuations of the unpredictable void. Damon Farragut, For a Romantic Realism Introduction Gazing across the flats around Wendover, it is easy to imagine a landscape of purity and agelessness, perhaps what a world would look like without any humans at all. Parts of the area can even look like an alien planet, from the red and turquoise water of the Great Salt Lake, to the treeless hillsides marked with the shorelines of even greater ancient inland seas. One sees a world governed by geomorphological forces, by erosion, and evaporation. However, this view is incomplete. To see the full beauty of this landscape, one has to understand the integral role that humans have had in creating and transforming it. In the Great Salt Lake Desert the scale of the engineer's interaction with the comparatively inert material of the earth suggests a relationship that is geologic in time and space. It is clear that man too has become a major geomorphological agent. Chemical industries pump brine into massive evaporation ponds, using an elaborate system of canals to channel the water, and levees to contain it. The valuable compounds removed from the evaporite come from the surrounding landscape, from minerals which melted from the mountains and collected in the deep packed powder of the flats over millions of years, within this basin without drainage to the ocean. The military has used over three million acres in the region for bombing and training activities, and more than a thousand square miles of land outside of military reserves has undocumented and unexploded bombs buried in its soil. Rocket engines, explosives, and propellants are manufactured at two large industrial sites in the region, and explosions from the disposal and testing of munitions shake and crater the landscape. Large-scale extractive industries in the region create new topographies of pits and tail- ings mounds, causing changes in the landscape that are clearly recorded by the contour lines of successive editions of USGS topographical maps. Hazardous waste disposal facilities have followed the political path of least resistance to this area, where the toxic and radioactive detritus from far away cities lies entombed in shallow troughs, closing parts of the landscape off from access to humans for thousands of years. The composition and water level of a vast inland sea is controlled by dikes, canals, and causeways, and a battery of pumps stand ready, should highways and real estate be threatened, to drain the sea into the surrounding desert. These anthropic landscapes, landscapes formed by man, do not exist in opposition to the beauty of the area, they exist as components of it. We see in the landscape a reflection of truth. And the beauty of the Great Salt Lake Desert region is only enhanced by a more complete knowledge of its constituents. Practical Notes This guide is organized in a counter-clockwise spiral around the Great Salt Lake, starting in Wendover, a town on the state line of Nevada and Utah. Many of the directional references use an I-80 exit number as a point of origin, as I-80 is the principal artery through the region. Exit numbers reflect the distance east of the state line. For example, Exit 2, the Wendover, Utah exit, is two miles east of the state line. From Salt Lake City, 120 miles east of Wendover, the principal artery becomes I-15, and directions are given relative to Salt Lake City and I-15. Directional information becomes less distinct around the top side of the Great Salt Lake, as does everything else. Though some maps and directions are provided in this book, it is expected that travel- lers in the region will have a more detailed map with them. Recommended maps include The Utah Travel Council's Northern Utah Map, which covers the region thoroughly, The Benchmark Road Atlas of Utah, and The DeLorme Utah Atlas and Gazetteer. Some regions are remote, especially around the top and west side of the lake, and the usual desert travel precautions should be taken in remote areas. None of the sites listed in this publication require an off-road-road or four-wheel drive vehicle in normal weather, though the higher the clearance the better. It is unlikely of course that you will break down or get lost, and the whole loop can be done in a day, if no stops are made. Gas is available on I-80 at Wendover,endover, Delle, and Lake Point, and on I-15 at numerous locations. Once off the Interstate after Brigham City, and around the north and west side of the lake, there are no services. The nearest services in this area are to the east, at Snowville, on I-84, and to the west at Montello, Nevada, on Highway 233. Points of Interest 1. Wendover Airbase 2. Jukebox Cave 3. Intrepid Potash 4. Pilot Peak Target Area, Vintage Bomb Crater 5. Bonneville Raceway 6. Blue Lake 7. Tree of Utah 8. Knolls 9. Grassy Mountain Hazardous Waste Site 10. Iosepa 11. Tekoi Test Range 12. Dugway Proving Ground 13. Clive Incineration Facility 14. Envirocare Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility 15. Aptus Hazardous Waste Incinerator 16. Utah Test and Training Range 17. Lakeside/West Desert Pumping Station 18. Lucin Cutoff/Salt Lake Causeway 19. Delle 20. Magnesium Chloride Plant 21. Bonneville Seabase 22. Donner-Reed Museum 23. Morton Salt Grantsville Facility 24. Tooele Army Depot, North Area 25. Tooele Army Depot, South Area 26. Black Rock Beach Resort Site 27. Saltair III 28. Saltair Pavilion, Original Site 29. Kennecott Copper Smelter 30. Bacchus Works 31. Bingham Pit 32. Hill Air Force Base 33. Antelope Island 34. Zirconium Plant 35. Great Salt Lake Minerals Plant 36. Thiokol Complex 37. Golden Spike Monument 38. Spiral Jetty 39. Terrace Town Site 40. Sun Tunnels 1 - Wendover Airbase Exit 2 off I-80, then head south of the town of Wendover, Utah. Called "Leftover Field" by Bob Hope when he visited in 1942, Wendover Airbase is now a large and largely unused World War II airfield, with a present at least as interesting as its past. Construction of the Wendover Airbase started in 1940, and by 1943 it was the largest military reserve in the world, in area. 23,000 military personnel were based in 668 buildings and trained on 3.5 million acres of the surrounding desert. It became the home for the training program for the first atomic bombing missions, later carried out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The remains of the assembly and modification areas associated with this top-secret program can be seen less than a mile south of the flightline of the Wendover Airport. The former office for Colonel Tibbets, the commander of the atomic bomb squadron, is now an underused public storage building. By the late 1950's, the base's use was in steep decline, and the Air Force officially transferred the base to the Town of Wendover in 1977. In 1999, the town surrendered the base to Tooele County, which now manages the airport and the remaining 100 buildings. 2 - Jukebox Cave Exit 4 off I-80, then head north on the Bonneville access road, and travel northwest on a series of small dirt roads to the base of the hills, looking for a path leading up to the mouth of the cave, which is now gated most of the time. This natural cave near Wendover was used for recreation by the military as a place to escape the heat in the summers, during WWII. A concrete slab was poured in the cave, and a club, complete with a bar and a jukebox, was established. 3 - Intrepid Potash The ponds cover the area south of I-80, between Exit 2 and several miles east of Exit 4. Intrepid's office and plant is located on the service road that runs south of I-80, between Exits 2 and 4. Intrepid Potash LLC is the only remaining extractive industry working on the flats east of Wendover, in an area once known as the Salduro Salt Marsh, which has been surface mined, using solar evaporation, for potash since World War I. Intrepid's operation, pur- chased from Reilly Industries in 2004 (Reilly had purchased it from Kaiser in 1988), extracts primarily potash and magnesium chloride, for use in fertilizers, dust suppression, and other industrial operations. The process of extracting minerals from the flats requires the simultaneous draining and flooding of vast areas. Water from rain and runoff seeps through salty ground bringing many valuable minerals into solution.