Spiral Jetty
In 1970, an American artist, Robert Smithson built a large earthwork sculpture on the edge of the the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500 foot-long, 15 foot-wide counterclockwise coil of rock, mud and salt. The work is located at Rozel Point on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, 31 miles south of the Golden Spike National Historical site. It can be reached by an occasionally rough dirt road. In this completely isolated area, there is no camping, water or facilities. You come, you look and you leave.
In a way, the Spiral Jetty illustrates the history of the levels of the Great Salt Lake from 1970 to present day. Shortly after it was constructed, by loads of rock from dump trucks, the lake level rose and covered it for 30 years. Building it was a gamble then, but a good one at the time. The level of the lake in 1963 was the lowest ever recorded since the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Great Salt Lake valley in 1847. In 1986 and again in 1987, exceptional rain and snowfall drove the level of the lake to record highs, 12 feet above historic lows. Since the lake is very shallow, (35 feet at its deepest point), and the area around the lake is very low, any expansion can cover a large area. In 1963 the lake covered 950 square miles, in 1987 the surface area of the lake covered 3,300 square miles.
In 2002 the sculpture resurfaced, and, with the lake currently drying up, it has remained visible ever since. The pinkish colored water of the Great Salt Lake gave it a sharp contrast to the black volcanic rock that it was constructed with. When we visited the lake in 2018, the edge of the water had receded about 300 yards from the old shore line. With continuing drought and lack of water to fill the lake, the lake edge has retreated further to a mile away from the sculpture. For the foreseeable future the sculpture will remain high and dry, not so much a jetty anymore but a kind of a lopsided bull’s eye when seen from the air. Will the water return to the area around the jetty? Right now it seems doubtful, with the continuing drought and lower precipitation in the area, it may never be surrounded by water again.
(My photographs of a view from up on the shore, and a look at it from inside the loop.)
