Fall is an incredible time to travel in Utah. The red rock country, having shed its heat and harsh light of summer, wears a warm sweater of soft light by day and brilliant starlight by night. At higher elevations, you can listen to elk bugle as the moon starts its journey across the night sky.

The thought of spending six days paddling 180 miles in one of the most inhospitable places on earth probably does not occur to most people as an appealing fall activity. It was a thought I hatched years ago when it became obvious the Great Salt Lake was on the path to setting a historic record low water level. I committed to myself that when that day came, I would circumnavigate the lake by kayak and document it.

As the lake dropped about 10 feet below what would be considered normal and neared a record low last year, the thought became more real. One clear reason to make the trip whispered in my ears: What many people see as a vast wasteland is a sea teeming with life, history and beauty. Like an old friend in need, the lake called out to me, and I responded. The lake has a story to tell, and I am one of the fortunate voices in the choir that gets to tell that story.

 

I approached Matt Kahabka about joining me for the trip. Most of his recreational pursuits involve brutally long distances in inhospitable environments with a high enough potential for death to be sporting. He seemed to be a good fit. In addition, he is amazingly curious, a solid realist with an upbeat enthusiasm, and he appreciates unusual places that most people do not.

Matt had one more defining characteristic: He is my youngest daughter’s boyfriend, which didn’t give him an easy way to say no. The entire family predicted the trip would be the end of the relationship. It was not so much because of the difficulty of the trip, as the difficulty of spending several days with me. As a father, I saw it differently – it was a chance to see if Matt was worth keeping around.

After a day paddling from Antelope Island to Fremont Island and back with Matt and my daughter Heidi, Matt and I began our expedition by paddling away from the Great Salt Lake State Park and Marina. The trip would push us to our mental and physical limits. At my stage in life, I would get some comfort knowing I can still do it, or some degree of wisdom knowing that I can’t. Matt, in his late 20s and the definition of fit, had little reason to doubt his ability to make the trip and immersed himself in the experience.

We took a compass bearing and adjusted it to account for drift from the wind and waves for our first landing, about 6 miles of open water away. We also carried the latest satellite technology with us for navigation and communication, but a compass and map are simply more fun. With our kayaks weighed down with enough supplies for 10 days, including more than 50 pounds of water each, we chugged through the brine. Normally we share this part of the lake with sailboats, but they had all been moved out of the marina due to the low water level.

When you are on the lake, you are always watching the wind and weather, like a zebra watches a lion. As we paddled, large waves broke across our bows – the ripple effect of waves generated by strong winds out of Weber Canyon. The waves on the lake are heavy, steep and close together, and can challenge even the saltiest of seagoers.

When we were about 3 miles from dry ground, the waves got more challenging – approaching the height where you lose sight of each other in the trough – and still growing. The heavily loaded kayaks didn’t play on the water as much as they plowed through it. Spray skirts kept our cockpits from filling with water, and paddling jackets kept us dry except for our exposed hands and heads, which were taking a beating.

Matt is a relative newcomer to sea kayaking, a sport that is a requirement if you want to hang around with Heidi. Like a pickup rider in a rodeo, I moved in behind him on his port side in case he needed assistance. It also allowed me to watch what he was doing so I could give him some pointers. With his natural athletic ability and self-reliance that came from many years of outdoor adventures, he adapted to the waves as naturally as a 3-year-old adapts to a mud puddle.

Occasionally, large red waves composed of salt water and dead brine shrimp rose in front of us.  After laying eggs, or cysts, the shrimp naturally die in late fall. I don’t believe there is a word in the English language that can adequately describe the feeling you have when a red wave smacks you in the face. You see it coming; you hear it splash; you feel it on your face and in your eyes, ears and nose; you smell it; and you taste it. It is an acquired taste and a very sensory experience. With your blurry eyes and flared nostrils on fire, and a flavor in your mouth that would make anchovies taste like chocolate, you paddle on. The waves eventually shifted from sporting to playful.

 

More than 10 million birds representing more than 330 species rely on the lake, making it one of the most important shorebird habitats in North America. Feeding 10 million birds requires a pretty large and efficient cafeteria, and it was that cafeteria I was most interested in seeing.

Cyanobacteria, algae and other microorganisms thrive in the lake’s shallow water. Some species of microorganisms are free-floating, or planktonic, while others are attached to the floor of the lake. The attached organisms create microbialites, often referred to as living rocks.

The microbialites form when microorganisms take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis. This process changes the pH in the surrounding water, causing calcium carbonate to precipitate out of the water and into the mats of microorganisms. The calcium carbonate builds up, along with other sediments that get trapped in the microbe mats, forming mounds called microbialites.

The cyanobacteria and algae in the microbialites are the food source for brine flies, which are, in turn, one of the two primary food sources for the birds. If you are on the lake at the right time, you can see brine flies bubbling up like champagne from the microbialites below as they start their adult stage in life. The first thing the flies do when they surface is try out their new wings, flying right into your mouth and lodging at the back of your throat. They are also fond of the nose and ears.

The other food source for birds is brine shrimp, which graze on the floating microorganisms. Brine shrimp are not picky eaters: If it fits in their mouth, they will do their best to eat it. The question is, with lowering water levels and increasing salinity levels, how much longer can these food sources survive? One of the major reasons for the trip was to document the current status of the microbialites.

Our first stop was Eardley Spit, south of Stansbury Island. On a map, it looks like a man-made structure, about 4 miles long and 3 football fields wide cutting across the lake from the west shore. The spit is one of many fault lines that run under the lake.  As we paddled by the end of the spit, we could see a long string of microbialites emerging from the water. A gull was perched on the top of each one, claiming it as a private island.

It was fascinating to see the bottom of the lake above the water. The only problem is that when microbialites are exposed to the air, they die. We saw vast expanses of exposed microbialites. The lake hitting a record low is concerning for many reasons, and the potential collapse of the food chain is one of them. We were seeing what we had come to see, and it was an unpleasant sight.

Climbing out of our kayaks we stretched our legs. While Matt, with a curious expression and wobbly legs, was playing a game of one step forward and two steps back on a steep dune, a rogue wave came in from the east, covering my deck and filling my cockpit with dead brine shrimp. Matt enjoyed a good laugh and then went back to trying to climb the dune. The shrimp were sticky and smeared when I attempted to scrape them out, leaving my kayak with a nice fishing pier aroma for the rest of the trip. In many ways, paddling the lake is a lot like going down a rabbit hole, and you just need to accept it.

 

As we paddled north, we slowly passed what were once islands large and small, now just mounds on the dry, exposed lakebed.  We covered 23 miles in the waves of the first day and 27 miles in waves on the second day, leaving us 10 miles behind schedule.

In the dark hours of the morning of the third day, we went through a breach in the railroad causeway. Built in the late ’50s, the causeway essentially divided the lake into two lakes. The northwest end of the lake has no freshwater inlet, and with the causeway limiting the mixing of waters from the south, the water is at the full saturation level of salt, about 27 percent.

Even in the dim twilight, we could tell we had gone down another rabbit hole. As the light increased, there was a purple glow. Rafts of ice crystals reflected on the surface of the calm water, along with thin mats of foam mixed with brine shrimp cysts. The sun climbed into the sky, and the white salt on the bottom of the lake reflected the light, making the water look like raspberry lemonade. The color is a byproduct of the microorganisms that live in the water.

We made an early start hoping to make up 7 miles, as the wind and waves had hampered our progress. We passed Gunnison Island, a nesting place for American white pelicans and off limits to people. It is also where Stansbury and Gunnison built one of their triangulation stations while mapping the lake from 1849 to 1851. We continued north. In places, the dry lakebed stretched out for more than 11 miles to the west. If a lightning storm blew in, we would be the highest point.

Good adventures are often more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge. It had been days since we had seen another person or anything in the environment that could be called familiar. Matt, a master navigator in almost any terrain, commented in bewilderment, “There is nothing about the lake that gives me a sense of scale or distance.” After 30 years on the lake, I had to admit I still have the same problem. Looking north with the sun at our back, the lake disappeared with the curvature of the earth. The Hogup Mountains were visible, and the Raft River Mountains at just under 10,000 feet looked like small hills.

Mirages danced in front of us, taunting our senses. Somewhere between us and the Raft River Mountains was the north end of the lake, and from what we could discern, it could be 10 miles or 100 miles away.  Our kayaks moved slowly. We felt we were paddling hard even though fatigue was setting in. 

What we saw more than anything else was endless water and dry lakebed.  The lake has about 45 percent less surface area now than it does at normal levels. That equates to about 750 square miles of exposed lakebed.

We were far from being lost, but at the same time, we were not very sure where we were; we could have been on another planet, based on the view.  There was no need for a map or GPS. We just had to keep pushing ahead. Like a climber on a steep snow slope putting one foot in front of the other time and time again, just to have the horizon fade into another higher horizon, we paddled on. Everyone experiences this feeling sometime in life – often it is the feeling of life itself.  We finished the day having covered just under 40 miles, more than making up for the previous days.

 

Everything stops working in salt; rudders, Velcro, zippers, snaps and even knots stopped working. Electronics stayed safely stowed. Salt crystals formed on our arms, paddles and the decks of the kayaks. Salt crystals also grew underneath our kayaks, creating incredible drag, which solved the mystery of our slow progress. We had to stop and scrape them off. With the salt crystals removed from the kayaks, our pace improved from about 2 knots to just over 4 knots with less effort.

We paddled in salt, sat in salt, cooked in salt, ate in salt and slept in salt. It was a real potato chip sort of a feeling. While making a crossing south of Spiral Jetty, fatigue penetrated deep into our muscles. We had passed the 100-mile mark about 10 miles earlier. True to his nature, Matt’s curiosity trumped the need to continue. He stopped paddling and started putting his hands in the water. After a few attempts, he used the tip of his finger to pick up a delicate hopper salt crystal that was floating on the surface of the water.

“Look,” he exclaimed, “it’s an inverted pyramid.” Later, he said, “Every time this lake grinds you down, it also shares a little bit of magic.”

On our last salty night on the north end, we made land about 25 minutes before sunset. As I unloaded gear from my kayak, I heard a voice say, “Oh, this feels good.” I looked toward the lake to see Matt floating in a sea of raspberry lemonade. With no time to spare before sundown, I took off everything that I planned to wear later and made my way into the water, my hat still on my head. Because of the density of the water, you float in the lake, and after paddling about 120 miles, what we experienced was more relaxing and luxurious than the finest spa.

It was a bit of refreshment we both needed. Matt had endured miles of inhospitable waters in a kayak and never lost his curiosity and reverence for the lake. Other than pain in his lower back, he was showing no signs of wear and tear. I was just glad to still have a pulse.

We started the next day at 4:30 a.m., when I awoke to Matt cooking blueberry pancakes. He was casually sitting in the salt while cooking on a small gas stove like he does it every day. “I thought we could use a few extra calories to get over the railroad causeway,” he said. I added some backyard chicken eggs to the meal. We reached the railroad causeway near the tip of Promontory Point and had to carry our gear and kayaks up and over it. Entering Gilbert Bay, the water looked so clear and pristine compared to the raspberry lemonade we had been paddling in that we both had the feeling that we could drink it.

Looking over the tops of more dead microbialites, we could see north, up the Bear River drainage. The wetlands of the Bear River create a paradise for birds and were the most important wetland sustaining the Northwest Shoshone before the arrival of the pioneers. Evaporation ponds for mineral extraction and the railroad causeway span the lower end of the bay now. Water was no longer flowing into the lake from the Bear River, historically the largest tributary to the lake.

While crossing to Fremont Island, Matt announced a wind coming from the west. Looking west, I could see what looked like troubled water, but it was more spectacular than wind waves. Eared grebes – as many as 5.6 million, or almost the entire population on earth – congregate on the lake each fall to fatten up on brine shrimp before their flight south. We paddled through large flocks of eared grebes for the next 35 miles of the trip. We ended that day in the campground on Antelope Island. Heidi cooked us a gourmet dinner, and we had a relatively comfortable night sleeping on the concrete pad by the picnic table. Civilization felt good.

On the last beautiful early morning of the trip, we paddled along Antelope Island on our way south for 25 miles. It was just us and a few million eared grebes. The 1,200-foot-tall Kennecott smokestack that is dwarfed by the Oquirrh Mountains that rise more than 4,000 feet above the lake is the beacon that led us back to the safety of the south marina.

In today’s world of jumping off a cliff while attached to a bungee to see what happens, pounding out 30 grueling miles a day in difficult water may not fit the definition of an adventure.

This trip was an adventure, but it was more of a trip of relationships. I was paddling water I had paddled for over 30 years, and Matt was just starting his experience on the lake. Matt and Heidi are still together. I am planning another trip around the lake with possibly the best adventuring partner I have ever had. Matt and I will be coated in salt again about the time this article is published. I think one of the things that makes strong relationships is sharing challenging experiences that help to develop understanding. It is even better when those challenges are in support of something beyond ourselves.

The people of Utah are just starting to develop a new relationship with and understanding of the lake. I think that relationship will be the only thing that can save the lake, along with some generous help from Mother Nature. Utah truly is a place of uniqueness and wonder, and the Great Salt Lake is one of the reasons why.