Day 1, 9:00 AM, Salt Palace, Salt Lake City, Utah
The bus met the passengers at the Salt Palace, a convention center across from Temple Square, the cultural center of Utah, ground zero of the global LDS empire, and where all numbered roads in Salt Lake City originate. Once everyone was on board, we headed north up the interstate, while the group listened to an introduction about the Center, the tour, and the Great Salt Lake itself, slowly being lulled into a state of readiness for the transformative events that lay ahead.

As we traveled around the edge of the lake, it became apparent that the lake is often on the edge of perceptibility, is elusive, vague, and mysterious. Almost impossible to look at, at times. The water and sky sometimes merge to create a silvery spaceless perceptual chasm, a sort of hole in our sight. It is into this hole, this perceptual drain, that we were headed. Smithson’s precedent (especially his Tour of the Monuments of Passaic) set the trajectory, from which we launched into an experiential miasmic odyssey.

Like the Spiral Jetty itself, the journey was a counterclockwise spiral inward, around the lake, and into the void. We followed along the path of least resistance, like captives of the great hemispheric coriolis effect, going down the drain of the Great Basin. But this is where the metaphor stops, as there is no Away – this basin does not drain anywhere. There is no connection with the rest of the continental landscape, no sedimentary streams of erosion carrying the powdered mountains out to the sea. What happens in the Basin, stays in the Basin. The drain is plugged, and the backed up flood is the Great Salt Lake.

In the age of the glaciers, pleistocene ancestors of the Great Salt Lake once covered much of the state. Even the high ground where Temple Square is today was once submerged. Then a great rupture occurred in the north, ending Utah’s terrestrial baptism, when the lake broke through its natural dam and spilled across southern Idaho. As this cataclysmic inundation dissipated and the lake shrank, a new age took hold, and grips the land still: now it is evaporation that rules this landscape.

In the Great Salt Lake basin it rains as little as four inches per year, while the evaporation rate rises as high as six feet per year. Snowmelt coming down the slopes of the Wasatch keep the lake in a fluctuating equilibrium. Over the past 40 years, the lake surface elevation has changed within a range of 20 feet, and with its gradual shoreline this resulted in a doubling, and halving, in size.

In 1986, the lake was at the highest it had been in a hundred years. Railways and real estate were being flooded, so the State built a battery of pumps at the edge of the lake to spread the lake out into the western salt flats. 18 years later, in 2004, the lake was nearing its lowest level again. By the time the CLUI tour group got to the Spiral Jetty, the lake level was 16 inches lower than when the Jetty was constructed in 1970.

11:30 AM, Spiral Jetty
The group was met by Bob Phillips, the contractor who built the Jetty for Smithson. Mr. Phillips told us about how his rocky relationship with Smithson became one of mutual appreciation, as the jetty grew, and how the construction period – just nine days – was later extended another five days when Smithson hired Mr. Phillips again to change the form of the tip of the Jetty to what we see today. Two other employees of the Whitaker Construction Company worked on the Jetty, driving the dozer and loader, and backing the dumptruck out further and further on the emerging spiral to dump its load of rock on the mud. Mr. Phillips was experienced at this sort of work, as he had built miles of dikes in the lake for the evaporation ponds of the Great Salt Lake Minerals Corporation.

For the next hour or so the group then rambled about the Jetty site, left high and dry by the low lake level, and ate box lunches in the sun. Mr. Phillips and CLUI associate Hikmet Loe were on hand to answer any other questions.

After the bumpy road back to the Golden Spike visitor center, where we got back into the bus (vans were hired for the round trip from the Spike to the Jetty as no tour bus company could be convinced to drive a bus down that road), the group headed back on the highway while watching Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film on the video monitors.

Over the Top
The bus stopped at the sprawling Thiokol rocket plant for a brief briefing by a Thiokol representative, who assured us that a visit inside the site’s dozens of square miles of intriguing architectures of explosives production and storage facilities would not be possible.
Then it was over the top of the lake via Interstate 84, Highway 42, and Highway 30, a total of 120 miles that were remote to the extreme. For many miles the only structure we saw was an Asian American meditation center, surrounded by trailers and goats. This is ranching country, just south of the Idaho line. We passed through two small towns, neither with any services except a highway department yard, Mormon church, a school, and a telephone relay station. We watch the film Sun Tunnels in preparation for the next stop. Then at Grouse Creek Junction we meet with the vans again for the dirt road portion of the trip to Lucin.

6:00 PM, Sun Tunnels
The Sun Tunnels are just south of the town of Lucin, which no longer exists. Lucin is where the gravel rail causeway that cuts across the middle of the Great Salt Lake makes its western landfall. Early efforts to arrange to take the bus across the cutoff on the dirt road that runs next to the tracks were thwarted by the railway company, and eventually abandoned due to the high likelihood of a tire failure. That trip will have to wait.

The Sun Tunnels emerge from the flat plain south of Lucin as a distant grey dot, that slowly grows into a cluster of four 18 foot long concrete tubes as you approach. The tubes are aligned with the solstice and are large enough to walk in. They were constructed by the artist Nancy Holt, who visited the region often with her husband, Robert Smithson. It is tempting to make comparisons between the two famous land art sites of the Great Salt Lake desert: one a feminine, circular, astrological axis mundi, the other a peninsular, quarried rockpile, but it is best to just let them be, to let them become much more than that, on their own.

As the sun sank low, it was time to go. Back on the bus, it was an hour and half to our stop for the night, at Wendover, Nevada. To pass the time on board, the group was subjected to the film Damnation Alley. The film depicts an arduous journey across a United States that has been transformed by a nuclear armageddon into a landscape of violent toxic geography, with radioactive storms, mutant monsters, and other hardships of the post-apocalypse. The filmic journey is being made by a small group inside an elongated four wheel drive vehicle, which, though not exactly like the CLUI tour bus, is not altogether unlike the CLUI tour bus. This film was shown, partly, in the context of Smithson’s appreciation of such monolithic sci-fi. Much of the film was shot in the Great Salt Lake Desert, and its themes were a sort of prelude for the next phase of the tour, to be had on the following day. Continue to Day 2 of the tour.

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