Full-disclosure, I’m writing this in post. I’m certainly romanticizing it. But people keep asking “what was your favourite moment” “what’s the most beautiful thing from the trip” “what was the best part”? And I don’t have a clear answer to that. At this point in the narrative, our best gigs are perhaps still ahead of us (though it’s a close thing, Reno WAS pretty awesome – and there were BIG HEART moments) and Yellowstone behind, but as I write this on October 15th, looking back, this is the moment that stands out as a favourite because it’s unplanned, strange, surreal…
We’d been driving all day, we’d come through Thunder Mountain and across the small portion of the Salt Flats that we were going to get to see. Salt Lake City and it’s nest of mountains slowly loomed on the horizon and it became clear as they turned red in the setting sun that they were not going to deliver snowcaps either.
We’re turning left at Salt Lake City preparing to climb into the Wasatch when someone, Heather I think, says they want to see the sun set over the lake.
It’d been a touchy day, so having a sudden mission sounded like a good plan to me and I directed us off on an immediate exit that looked like it headed in the right direction as Kristen started looking at maps for routes down to the lake. We racing the sun down and I was pretty sure we wouldn’t make it but the sun hung red in the western sky forever, as if it was waiting for us.
We found ourselves at the gated parking lot of what looked like something out of a last-century production of Arabian Nights called the Great Saltair. Onion towers and glowing gold leaf and a dozen cars that all had the same idea. We hightailed it out of the car and down onto the beach walking fast in the hopes of hitting the water before the sun went down.
It wasn’t till we were passing the building itself that we were realizing just how far the water was and we had to make the decision of whether we were walking ALL the way down to the water… at a good clip as the sun wasn’t going to wait FOREVER.
A good number of people were further out, a good number of people had given up, but the space is horizon to horizon so the 3 or 4 clusters of people were dwarfed and we still felt alone. We decided to push on.
Aided by the salt crust on the sand it was easy to make good time down to the water until it wasn’t. A rotted miasma started surrounding us and we slowly realized that some of the black shapes in the sand wasn’t sticks and seaweed, the usual flotsam, but beaks and skeletal wings and ribs and heads. Long black shadows distorted the shapes but we realized we were passing through a patch of dead birds. Carefully taking steps over and around the scene of carnage we picked up the pace again only to encounter another strange avian graveyard and another.
Finally back into fresh air we made our way to the water and Heather dipped her toe in it as the last of the sun vanished under the water.
We stood and watched the colours change and eventually worked our way back. When we had signal again I looked up some details – the Great Saltair, since the late 1800s it’s been destroyed by fire, rebuilt, damaged, rebuilt, and still hosts music out on the beach. I don’t recognize any of the band names but whether that’s because they only host small acts that I’ve never heard of because I’m 2000 miles from home or I don’t know the names because I’m decades older than the average beach-going concert-goer, I don’t bother to figure out.
The birds died of bird flu. Utah’s had a number of bad bouts of bird flu amongst its seabird population and when they die in the water of the largest salt lake in the hemisphere they’re preserved from scavengers and predators and bacteria alike. They wash in and wash out with the varied levels of the lake, growing in number and getting caught up in nightmare accumulations like the ones we navigated.
I didn’t document it like I should’ve. On the way out I was more focused picking my way through them and keeping up the pace. On the way back it was dark and getting darker and we still had another hour to our beds (and square toilet). The phrase “some things you just have to remember” is usually said in a scolding tone as I’m lamenting not getting a camera up fast enough, but this is probably better in memory. I doubt Heather or Kristen would tell it the same.
A strange macabre fantasy of avian death as the sun sets over a lake destined to die in the next decade unless some sort of conservation policy goes into place. Sad and beautiful. I think it stands out as a favourite moment on the trip as that moment could never be replicated.
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