An Examination of the Anthropic Landscape
Through Maps and Photographs
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"On the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, the
horizon dissolves into the sky, the earth blends with
the heavens, and the spiral jetty, in the foreground,
lies encrusted and submerged in the fluctuations of
the unpredictable void."
-Damon Farragut, From the essay, For a Romantic Realism
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Gazing across the flats around Wendover,
it is easy to imagine a landscape of purity and agelessness,
perhaps what a world would look like without any humans at
all. Parts of the area can even look like an alien planet,
from the red and turquoise water of the Great Salt Lake, to
the treeless hillsides marked with the shorelines of even
greater ancient inland seas. One sees a world governed by
geomorphological forces, by erosion, and evaporation.
However, this view is incomplete. To see
the full beauty of this landscape, one has to understand the
integral role that humans have had in creating and transforming
it. Around Wendover, the scale of the engineer's interaction
with the comparatively inert material of the earth suggests
a relationship that is geologic in time and space. Around
Wendover, it is clear that man too has become a major geomorphological
agent.
Chemical industries pump brine into massive
evaporation ponds, using an elaborate system of canals to
channel the water, and levees to contain it. The valuable
compounds removed from the evaporite come from the surrounding
landscape, from minerals which melted from the mountains and
collected in the deep packed powder of the flats over millions
of years, within this basin without drainage to the ocean.
The military has used over three million
acres in the region for bombing and training activities, and
more than a thousand square miles of land outside of military
reserves has undocumented and unexploded bombs buried in its
soil. Rocket engines, explosives, and propellants are manufactured
at two large industrial sites in the region, and explosions
from the disposal and testing of munitions at nearby military
grounds still shake and crater the landscape.
Large-scale extractive industries in the
region create new topographies of pits and tailings mounds,
causing changes in the landscape that are clearly recorded
by the contour lines of successive editions of topographical
maps.
Hazardous waste disposal facilities have
followed the path of least resistance to this area, where
the toxic and radioactive detritus, the negative byproduct
of industrial processes, comes from far away cities, and lies
entombed in shallow troughs, closing parts of the landscape
off from access to humans for thousands of years.
The composition and water level of a vast
inland sea is controlled by dikes, canals, and causeways,
and a battery of pumps stand ready, should highways and real
estate be threatened, to drain the sea into the surrounding
desert.
These anthropic landscapes, landscapes
formed by man, do not exist in opposition to the beauty of
the area, they exist as components of it. We see in the landscape
a reflection of truth. And the beauty of the region around
Wendover is only enhanced by a more complete knowledge of
its constituents.
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Radioactive Waste Site
Envirocare Photo
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One of the largest radioactive waste repositories
in the nation, and currently the only commercial facility
that can accept mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes. Since
it was opened by the Department of Energy for the disposal
of uranium mill tailings, this facility has greatly expanded
and now accepts radioactive material from most of the DOE's
major industrial sites, from commercial generators, and numerous
military sites.
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Lakeside/West Desert Pumping Station
CLUI Archive
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Lakeside is an outpost for the railroad, located
on a peninsula where the Lucin Cut-off causeway across the
lake briefly touches the mainland. This settlement, in a remote
area at the western shore of the Great Salt Lake, also served
as the base camp for the West Desert Pumping Station project,
a battery of pumps designed to reduce the water level of the
Great Salt Lake.
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Rocket motor and aerospace complex
CLUI Archive
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Thiokol builds the NASA space shuttle rocket
motors at this isolated facility near the Promontory Mountains.
Other defense and propulsions systems are developed and tested
here by Thiokol, on this major R&D site, part of which
was once designated as "Air Force Plant 78". More
than three thousand people work in 450 buildings, clustered
in the various industrial and test areas, scattered throughout
the bare hills of the 30 square mile complex.
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Bonneville Salt Flat Raceway
Photo: Walt Cotton
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Speed trials take place in the summer on the
flats, with drivers following a 10 mile long line, painted
on the hard packed salt. Numerous land speed records have
been achieved at Bonneville, on the vast and flat natural
pavement: the 300, 400, 500, and 600 mile per hour land speed
barrier were all broken here over the years. The Blue Flame,
a rocket-powered four-wheeled vehicle, set the land speed
record of 631.4 miles per hour at Bonneville in 1970.
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Jukebox Cave
Photo: Mike Asbill
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A natural cave near Wendover was used for recreation
by the military, as a place to escape the heat in the summers,
during WWII. A concrete slab was poured and a club, complete
with a bar and a jukebox, was established.
This active mine is the biggest open pit copper
mine in the world. Digging started in 1904, and the hole is
now half a mile deep and more than two miles wide. It is expected
to be enlarged until the ore runs out sometime after the year
2020. Owned and operated by Kennecott Copper Company, which
employs 2,400 people at the site and the nearby smelter.
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Desert Scuba Pond
CLUI Archive
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A natural, spring-fed lake, a few hundred feet
across, located inside the Wendover bombing range. The pool
is 60 feet deep in places, and the water stays at a comfortable
75 degrees year round. Populated almost continuously with
scuba divers, there are submerged platforms, some built into
the vertical walls and some kept aloft with buoys, adding
a sort of submarine architecture to this clear blue aqueous
chasm in the middle of the desert.
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Chemical weapons incinerator
CLUI Archive
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The Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility
incinerator was built to dispose of the nearly 30 million
pounds of aging mustard and nerve gas (42.3% of the nation's
stockpile) that are stored in 208 igloos at the Tooele Army
Depot. The incinerator, completed in 1994 at a cost of several
hundred million dollars, is yet to go on line due to safety
concerns and licensing delays.
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Atomic bomb loading pit
Photo: Richard Misrach
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Wendover Airbase became the home for the training
program for the first atomic bombing missions, later carried
out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The remains of the assembly
and modification areas associated with this top-secret program,
code-named "Project 47", can be seen less than a
mile south of the flightline of the Wendover Airport.
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Site of the original Saltair Pavilion
CLUI Archive
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Saltair, a grand Moorish pavilion in the best
Victorian tradition, opened in 1893. The massive edifice sat
out on the great Salt Lake, on over 2,500 wooden pilings which
were steam-driven into the mud. In 1926, Saltair was completely
destroyed by fire. A new resort, even larger and more elaborate
than before, was built by new owners. 1955 brought another,
though less devastating fire, followed two years later by
a wind storm that toppled the roller coaster. In 1958, battered
and financially impracticable, the resort was donated to the
State, which shut it down. Saltair burned for the last time
in 1970, after 11 years of abandonment, and most of the remains
were removed.
An artwork by Nancy Holt, completed in 1976,
consisting of four large concrete tubes, laid out in the desert
in an open X configuration. The nine foot diameter, 18 foot
long "tunnels" are pierced by holes of varying size,
that correspond with the pattern of selected celestial constellations.
There is a tunnel for Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn.
According to the EPA, this magnesium chloride
plant is the nation's worst air polluter. MagCorp releases
more than a hundred of tons of chlorine per day from its stacks,
in a cloud that can be seen from as far away as Nevada.
