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Published: January 31st 2008
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Posted by: Onaxthiel
Ogden looked like a nice place to explore, but we had a deadline to meet and one planned stop to make before we left the state of Utah. The largest island on the Great Salt Lake is called Antelope Island, and it is a massive state park and wildlife preserve.
I was aware of the island for another reason. On October 29th, 1992, an Air Force Special Operations helo crashed about one mile off the northern point of the island in poor weather at night. The bird was carrying the command section of the training exercise being conducted, consisting of the commanders of first and third Ranger battalions, The commander of the Air Force squadron participating in the exercise, a company first sergeant, Air Force Operators and crew, and two lower enlisted Ranger radio men for the command section. One of these radiomen was a 19 year old Wisconsin kid by the name of Jeremy B. Bird. He is my Airborne Ranger in the sky, and the young man who's grave I was looking for in the earliest days of our trip. I used to get smoked by NCOs in his memorial sand pit/ volley ball
Black Slab
Showing the victims of the crash court, and later went on to serve in his old company.
Now there is a memorial near the crash site dedicated to the five Rangers and seven Air Force personnel killed in the crash. It is seldom visited in the winter months, as evidenced by the snow we removed from the name placards placed in the ground. It was a good experience.
On our way out to the island we spotted a barn owl perched on a sign just off the side of the causeway. He showed us his unique owl talents, like doing exorcist impressions by twisting his head all the way around, and then gave us a searching stare by turning his face sideways. A brief stop at the visitors center gave us a time line of the islands history. Native inhabitants until they got bored prior to the arrival of whites, then used as a home for a local judge, and then as ranching land. It was in this final use that the island received a small herd of buffalo around the turn of the last century. This herd thrived, and eventually consisted of almost 400 head when the rest of the species was nearing
extinction. So in 1926, the rancher took the heroic step of opening up his land to the last bison hunt. After all, if the species is almost gone, you might as well make sure that everyone with enough money has a chance to mount one more head on their wall before the government does something wacky like making them a protected creature. The herd was greatly reduced in size, but managed to recover, and even grow, to a present size of around 600 Buffalo. The center also informs you of the salinity of the lake, and how it varies from region to region. The section Antelope Island is near, for instance, is only about 5% salt, while the northern part of the lake is around 25%. This means that the water is so saline that there are literal chunks of salt sitting at the bottom of the lake due to the waters inability to keep that much mineral suspended in itself.
We decided to cruise around the parts of the park that were open in the winter and see what we could see. We weren't in a huge hurry, and there might be something out worth seeing. We were
Owl showing off.
Thinks hes so cool, just because he can twist his head around. I could do that, I just don't want to! rewarded in short order when we watched a coyote cut across a small, frozen inlet near one of the roads. Obfuscator finally had an opportunity to view one, if only at a distance. This got us excited enough to explore further, and we encountered a few more of the small scavenger in the next two hours. Along the way, we also found a herd of Antelope. While the island is named for them, they weren't present for a long stretch of time, until a recent re-introduction that is going along fairly well, if not as successfully as the buffalo program.
Once our drive around the island was through, we started the next leg of travel. We planned on making it to the Great Basin National Park for camping for the night, and this would require us to cover a great deal of distance, most of it not very scenic. Specifically, the the first half of the drive along the Great Salt Lake and near the Salt Flats. The lake itself was shrouded in mist and snow as we were driving, making it even less pretty than one would anticipate for a mostly dead body of water. (Incidentally, the visitors
center also told us that the GSL isn't really dead. They have Sea Monkeys!)
The salt flats were about what I expected. Totally flat roads running across totally flat salt/dirt terrain, in an unerringly straight line. The only things that we could detect along the route were man made accents to the side of the road. Here a memorial to a deceased driver. There a satellite antenna array painted to look like a series of tennis balls. And every so often, what looked like an Indian holy site, a set of stones or logs reminiscent of the prayer wheel we saw on our first leg. Finally a rest area appeared and took a break. It was the site marker to tell us that we were looking at the Bonneville speed way. The snow had cleared up enough for us to see the mountains in the distance, and the reflections of these peaks in the thin layer of melted snow on the flats made for an interesting image. We stopped to gas up in a town called Wendover on the Utah/ Nevada border. Wendover was home to the largest bomber training base in the US in the Second World War, and
Rabbit
Trying to keep warm still has the runways and bunkers to prove it. Their most famous alumnus are the crews that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but around 15,000 Air crewmen passed through between 1942 and 1945. These days the airport is a bit run down, as is the whole town, and it's most recent brush with fame was being the site used to imitate Area 51 for the movie Independence Day. If you are in the area and have time, I thought the stop at the museum was well worth it. As for the town itself, there is a white line painted across the road where Utah stops and Nevada begins. You really don't need this delineation to know, though. On Utah side is a run down main street that looks like it suffers from a bit of a gang problem, or at least a tagging problem. On the Nevada side you are immediately confronted with casinos, bars and hotels. In short, the reason the depressed side of the border seems to have gang issues.
After leaving town we began climbing the nearby mountain range. We were soon enveloped by clouds that turned the afternoon into an early dusk, the
It's hard to tell...
But that is a coyote in the middle of the shot. sun into a coldly shaded moon. It was like driving into the Twilight Zone. We drove this way for hours, until arriving in the town of Ely. Due to the plethora of casinos in the town, motels were cheap, so we opted to call our drive on account of being tired and being able to use the internet connection, to resume the drive towards Grand Basin in the morning.
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