A lot of salt and then a bunch of open sky

By: Zoë

Thursday night at the Mountain View RV Resort in Heber City, Utah, was a bit chillier than we were used to but we slept well anyway. As cool as the RV park was we weren’t exactly sad to see it go. Today we were going to drive to South Fork State Recreation Area but along the way we planned to see the Great Salt Lake and Salt Flats. The Salt Lake was not exactly what I thought it would be. I imagined that the beaches would be made out of salt instead of sand, that the smell of the salt would overpower any other smell in the air, and the water would have a milky look to it. As soon as we arrived I discovered I was wrong. We parked then decided to go check out the lake. The walk there was longer than expected, half a mile I think, the sand was not soft powdered salt it was hard and brown beneath my feet and made a crunching sound as l walked.

The aroma of salt was barely noticed because of the stench of decaying flesh that sounded me. Every 5 feet I would see a dead bird that fell out of the air who knows how long ago and was preserved by the salt.

As we got closer to the shore the stench got more intense and I started to notice the swarms of small gnat like bugs invading the shore lines you would send of waves of the little guys with every step!

We took a couple of pictures with the Worry Eaters and posed along the shore line, then we rolled up our pants kicked of our shoes and waded in to the grate salt lake. The water was so shallow for so long that it looks like you can walk on water!

        After the salt lake, we hit the road again. This time I fell asleep. When I woke up I saw white. White for as far as I could see, white and flat. We pulled over to explore. We walked out on the salt flats and quickly discovered that the salt sticks to the bottom of your shoes which makes your feet feel heavy.

 I looked around and watched the people surrounding me, a little boy made a snow ball out of salt, another rode his bike around the flats, a woman took a picture of him, a man rode around in a flat cart with wheels. I scooped up a dry salt crystal and slipped it into the finger of a plastic glove and tucked it in to my organizer, it would have to stay there until I had better options.

      As soon as we arrived at the camp site I jumped out and took a nice deep breath of fresh air. I was sick of being squished in the car. As soon as I got out of the car I noticed a funky looking penny on the ground, I bent over to pick it up, a few inches away from the penny I saw a green piece of limestone in a perfect cube, and across from that was a rusty old gear, I piled the treasures on the side of the wooden sides of the gravel pit.
Kinsey saw me “Watcha doin?” she asked.
“Collecting” I replied.
“Can I help?”
“Sure.”
Soon our treasures were moved to an old Snapple bottle. A while after we took a walk by the reservoir with Mom and Dad. Because there was nowhere to get fire wood we had to collect driftwood off the shore. Meanwhile Kinsey and I were collecting anything that caught our eye. By now the bottle was filled with everything from seagull feathers to beach glass to snail shells. After our walk our walk we had to pick through our collections and find just the most interesting objects to keep.

The place we were staying was sort of desertyish but was next to a reservoir.  We were up on a hill with nothing but flat land with small dry brush for miles. In the distance you could see mountains that changed color depending on the position of the sun.

Sunset was our favorite time to watch them turn from a brilliant red to a smokey gray. The wind was yelling at us all night long, as if angry that we weren’t letting it in.  Made me glad we weren’t sleeping in a tent.

We had to walk a distance to the bathrooms and we were worried about mysterious holes all over the place that belonged to unidentified creatures. We saw one snake which we were pretty sure was not venomous. Luckily we had no serious encounters with the local wildlife. Dinner was corn on the cob and hot dogs cooked over a driftwood fire. It was scrumptious. We fell asleep to the sound of the angry wind.