Antelope Island State Park, Salt Lake City

Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake. It is named that because the first thing the guy who named it saw was antelope. Getting to Antelope Island reminded me of Vermont.  My family owns a lake house on South Hero, and the only way to get to it is a causeway running from the main land to the island. Similarly, there is a seven mile causeway that leads from Salt Lake City to Antelope Island. When we got there we checked out the visitors’ center to get information on where we should bike.  While my dad did that I went to the bathroom.  Wow they were awful.  Admittedly they were better than some of the vault toilets we had at the other campgrounds but still, ugg.  Everything was made out of concrete and corrugated steel.

After getting information we decided on a trail called Elephant Head Spur. To get to the trail we had to take an old Jeep road that made me wish we had a Jeep. The road was dusty and full of sand, so it was almost impossible to bike through. On top of that it was slightly uphill the entire time.  Compared to the road, the trail was a walk in the park.  It was all hard-packed relatively flat dirt with a few large rocks. Some of the rocks looked like coral, so my dad and I figured that it must be fossilized from when the lake was covered in ocean. That led us to think that that’s why the trail was called Elephants Head because it might have all been elephants head coral.  At the end of the trail we got a great view of the Great Salt Lake and part of the island that looked like a golf course.  We sat and took a break then started back. 

When we got back we took a swim in the Great Salt Lake because we just had to. The lake was incredibly floaty because of all the salt in it, so it was denser. The walk back to the car was really painful because the entire beach was made of calcium carbonate, some of which had hardened in to sharp rocks. The beach felt exactly like a normal beach, but when we looked closely we saw that all the granules were perfectly round. This happens when a tiny particle gets encased in layers of calcium carbonate. This is called oolitic sand where as the sand in Maine is made of silica.