The great salt lake

We knew the song but we had no idea what we would find at the Great Salt Lake. The song had us intrigued though, and we found ourselves heading toward Salt Lake City eager to find out what the hype was about!

The drive from Vegas brought about a scenery change from desert landscape to wide open green farm land. We didn't realise we'd driven through a time change either until we woke the next morning and walked into a packed Walmart store, later realizing it was 8am..not 7.

We learnt Salt Lake City was home to a recent Olympics before reaching the 'National Park' section of the information centre in town and got a good laugh out of the mannequin showing off the park ranger uniforms! With some tips on the best places to embrace the Gat Salt Lake and close to the weight of a phone book in brochures, we were back on the road and headed toward Antelope Island located in the middle of the lake itself!

Antelope island is not just as it sounds, in fact we didn't see any antelope and rather it should be named Bison Land! If you have never previously seen or heard of a Bison as we had not, this was a rather spectacular moment... the first time. Pulling into our campground, we were suprised to see one standing and eating not far from out site! A Bison is similar to the more commonly known buffalo with the addition of a sheep like coat. Unfortunately for the rather impressive specimines on show, we had caught them at somewhat of a bad hair month as they shed their winter coat in preparation for summer, leaving them looking rather scraggly! The sightings continued throughout our stay and became more and more like cows grazing aside the road, sadly it never ceased to amaze the car/ cars in front of us which had stopped to capture their special moments.

Amidst the many Bison viewings, we managed to fit in a couple of good little hikes up to a few view points and even pulled out the frisbee as we trekked toward the water which must have receded almost a kilometre from its original location at the scrubby shoreline. Due to the high levels of salt in the lake, the only living organisms were a few species of krill; and as we made our way along the vast salt encrusted ground toward the water our noses sensed the presence of the unfortunate little guys who hadn't managed to escape as the water line receded and on display were the skeletons of a number of small birds from the area which didn't find the food they were looking for in the apparent oasis beneath them and had not yet adapted to live off salty krills.

Aside from all the apparent negativity, we did enjoy our stay at the lake away from civilisation and can agree with its title of Greatness!