The Bonneville Lake

As we were driving over the salt flats on our way to SLC, I was curious and googled the history of the flats. I have to say, it’s quite interesting what mother nature can do over hundreds of years and centuries of time.

I remember a blurp in school about the salt flats, but it was just that, a day or maybe even half an hour of discussing the great phenomenon known as the Salt Flats.

You probably already know this, but I’m extremely fascinated by it and now I will share it with you, because that’s what I do.

The Salt Flats used to be Lake Bonneville that engulfed much of the Great Basin, and it was expansive. The lake dried up and shrank below its outlet, turning the water to salt and evaporating what water was left. Interesting! Even more interesting than that is that this occurred over 30,000 years ago. WHAT?

Now that I know this, I predict that the same is happening to the Great Salt Lake. MtnMan’s parents used to go boating and grew up swimming in the lake, but over the years it became too salty and the buoyancy made it too hard to swim in and I’m guessing the salt was too harsh on the boats. Today you won’t find even a sailboat on the water, nor sunbathers on the shore; the water line is slowly receding and will one day become another Salt Flat, just as Lake Bonneville did 30,000 years ago.

Wow, this fascinates me.