the promised land - part 2

 


Natural beauty. Perhaps if you live surrounded by it long enough, you don't see it. On our final evening in Utah, we were chatting with our waitress at dinner. She asked what all we'd seen while visiting, and we enthusiastically mentioned Antelope Island. She stared at us quizzically for a moment, then responded, "You went over there? Seriously? Whatever for?" She grew up there and has never been over to the island. I can't imagine not wanting to go. There's a lake. A really big lake. With an island. A really big island. Upon which is a mountain. A really big....well, perhaps not such a big mountain by Utah standards, but still. It seemed like an obvious destination.

 


There's a whole lot of history, both natural and human-type on the island. I'm not sure how much I absorbed of it, but in brief, the salt lake is really weird! Its salinity is something like 4-20 times that of seawater, depending on where at in the lake you are (don't quote me....it's close). The variation is partly due to man-made things like causeways. In some places there are 3-4 feet of salt precipitated on the bottom. At different points in history it covered way more area, basically the whole valley. For some reason I thought this would make the valley really infertile, but the opposite is apparently true. Also, the sand is rounder than beach sand (oolate they called it).

 


Oh, and there are actually two things that live in the salt lake...brine shrimp and brine flies.

 


In recent history, the island has been primarily used for ranching. (In really recent history, it's been a state park used for recreation). Various rather hardy folks have raised animals on the land. There's a ranch house to visit. This reads like a 4th grade essay, doesn't it? Ah well. History was never my strong suit.

 


There's a herd of pseudo-tame mule deer that hang out near the old ranch. They weren't terribly troubled by us.

 


One in particular, is more or less a pet of the volunteers there. Her name is "Whisper" and she has apparently been known to go inside the office to get her chow if they forget to put it out for her.

 


The thing we were looking for most of all while roaming about was bison. Apparently bison are not the same thing as buffalo...I was corrected. (Shhhh.....I still don't know the difference.) We finally spotted the herd at a distance while driving.

 


Then later, we came across this guy just kinda hanging out near the visitor center. Perhaps they pay him extra to pose for tourists. I took a number of pictures of him, but they were consistently of his behind. It was nice of him to stand in front of some pretty backdrop though. He probably gets a bonus for that.

 


I, as you might imagine, dubbed him "Bob."