Salt Lake City: The Lake That Gives the City Its Name Is Dying

The Great Salt Lake is to your left as you approach the city. Or rather, the ghost of the Great Salt Lake is to your left. The lake has lost roughly half its surface area since the eighteen seventies, when measurement began.

The primary cause is agricultural water diversion: the rivers that fed the lake, the Jordan, the Bear, the Weber, have been dammed and diverted to irrigate the farms and supply the cities that surround the basin. In recent years the lake has reached historic low levels, exposing a dry lakebed of concentrated minerals and heavy metals that become airborne dust when the desert wind blows. Salt Lake City sits in a valley that has an inversion problem, cold air gets trapped under warm air and holds pollutants at ground level, and the dust from the dying lake adds to what is already one of the worst winter air quality profiles in the West.

The Goshute people and the Shoshone people lived in the Great Basin. They managed this landscape in conditions of limited water and sparse resources through sophisticated knowledge systems that sustained communities here for thousands of years. The Pioneer settlers who arrived in eighteen forty-seven under Brigham Young found a dry, alkaline desert valley, and Young declared it the place to settle anyway.

They irrigated. Within twenty years the valley was producing enough food to sustain a significant population. The engineering worked.

The lake absorbed the consequences of that success over the next one hundred fifty years, and is still absorbing them. The Wasatch Range behind the city catches winter snow that supplies the ski resorts and the drinking water simultaneously. The license plate says the greatest snow on earth.

The claim is defensible.