UTAH OUTDOORS MAGAZINE (Aug 2002) - Monthly photography tips
Story and photo by Tom Till, master landscape photographer
THIS MONTH I’M going to digress briefly from my series about photographing atmospherics to sing the praises of the Great Salt Lake. Here in Utah, where we have a landscape that is filled with superlative world-class scenery, the great briny miniature ocean at the doorstep of Wasatch Front Megalopolis is oftentimes overlooked by photographers, Yet, every time I visit the lake I fall under its spell. Time spent exploring and looking for photographs around the inland sea almost always results, for me, in wonderful discoveries, surprises and great imagery I know of few other places in the West where you can expect the unexr pected, and where you can be so easily transported to a totally different world.
As Western photographers, we celerbrate water. Tiny waterfalls in the vastness of the Grand Canyon become special pockets of beauty due to the vast desert that surrounds them. The greens of a spring leap out at us as the antithesis of the earth colors we commonly work with. Streams are small, most natural lakes are small, and what we call rivers would be laughed at in most other parts of the world.
At the Great Salt Lake the tables are turned, and water is the operative element. It is everywhere, create ing a Mediterranean or Caribbean Sea like tableau, where one can imagine pirates, ancient Roman galleys, or Odysseus appearing around the bend.
Most of my work on the lake has focused on three areas: Stansbury Island, Promontory Point and Antelope Island. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I know, and I someday hope to visit many of the other small islands that dot the vast reaches of the seemingly limitless waves. Even exploring the lake's fringes by car can be rewarding, although a friend and I once spent three days looking for a natural arch near Lakeside that we now believe was taken out by errant bombs.
The trip to Promontory almost always includes a stop to photograph the beautiful trains at Golden Spike National Historic Site. A few years ago, the trains were repainted to accurately reflect the historic colors of the locomotives, and the vibrant hues of the Jupiter are great for close-up and detail scenes that scram with vivid color. Promontory is also the home ofsome of the most prolific blooms of pink prickly-pear cactus (May) I've seen anywhere in the West, and many of the outlying islands are also blanketed in blooms if conditions are right.
At Stansbury Island, I search for plants and rocks that have been heavily encrusted by salt, making them appear as if they are petrified or covered in a heavy casing of winter ice. The brilliant whites of the salt often reflect the blue sky, producing a pleasing cool cast to the shadows and sometimes to the salt itself. Also around Stanshury and at shoreline areas at Antelope Island, a nondescript plant called pickleweed puts on quite a show of color during peak years in September. The low-growing grass-like plant turns a strikingly beautiful fuchsia, a color unlike any other I have seen in nature, and is a brilliant photographic subject.
Antelope Island State Park is the center of lake activities -- a beautiful place of its own, but also a great jumping off point for further GSL explorations. In wet spring times, the entire causeway between the mainland and the island can be covered with dense stands of evening primrose. With a low angle and a lack of wind, the flowers make a dynamic foreground for the lake and its reflections. Antelope Island's buffalo are well known as photo subiects, my best buffalo image is a Georgia O'Keefe-esque scene with a buffalo skull foreground and the broad expanse of the lake beyond. At another time, I worked in awe as the sunset over the lake turned blood red, its colors emanating from a forest fire in the Stansbury Mountains. Everyone who sees these images thinks they involve some kind of computer fakery, but such technological fixes are not needed when the psychedelic colors of the lake weave their magic.
A recent sea kayaking trip I took starting from Antelope Island is typical of a Great Salt Lake adventure. After dragging our camera-laden boats across the drought-created flats, my companion and l proceeded across the lake, unworried about storms since the water rarely exceeded four feet in depth anywhere we paddled. As always, we were amazed at the clarity of the water, and the beautiful sandy bottom we could see below us. And, as in tropical locales, the sun bouncing through this unsullied liquid reflects blue sky back up, creating lake colors reminiscent of those I’ve seen at Bora Bora.
We did remark however, that we didn’t understand how such a beautiful place could smell so bad. The lake stench, a perfectly normal consequence of its landlocked ecology, will definitely separate scenery lovers from dilettantes at times. The hordes off flies, rising from beach areas in astronomical quantities, could also give some visitors pause. We took the interesting creatures for granted since their activities and numbers were more fascinating than troublesome. The power of causing literally millions of living organisms to move at your every whim was also an interesting, but slightly disturbing activity.
After several hours of paddling we reached our destination, some of the most amazingly sculpted rocks I've ever seen. At the lakeshore, pre-Cambrian rocks had been blasted by the mineral-laden power of lake waves into intricately patterned agate-like shapes, reminiscent of the best rock sculpting in Westwater Canyon or the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We cheated. To make the rock patterns a little more striking and contrasty, we sprinkled some lake water on them, immediately increasing the power of their shapes, textures, and patterns.
On our way home after magic hour, we paddled idyllically through the twilight. Reflections were everywhere, and at times it was hard to tell where the lake began and the sky ended. As a matter of fact, we speculated that the reflections we were seeing were some of the most outstanding possible, even better than ones I'd seen and photographed on Lake Powell many times before. Was the phenomenon a result of the slightly naturally oily surface of the lake, chock full as it is with hordes of strange minerals and salts? Maybe. But it was certainly an example of the photogenic beauty of Utah’s singular, spectacular Great Salt Lake.
