I find Mormons to be truly remarkable people. We visited Salt Lake City recently, and headed out to the Great Salt Lake. Brigham Young wasn’t kidding about “land nobody wants!” There’s almost nothing there, except swarms of flies. (I have no idea what they eat in the middle of the desert. As an aside, my wife’s family apparently went through Utah on the way to Oregon in the wagon train days. They noped the f—k out of there.) But these Mormons built civilization, a lovely society, in the middle of nowhere.
I live in Utah just North of SLC and I hear this every once in a while. The Wasatch Mountains here, to the East, are also pretty amazing. When I'm away I always miss these mountains. If you go West you hit the lake, which is low, muddy, stinky, and mostly dead and then there are the salt flats beyond. True, it's a desert, like much of the US, but the mountains are pretty amazing here. The best times to visit are Spring, Fall, or Winter. Hit this place in the heat of summer and you'll probably wonder why we're here (everything is dry). But it's nice in Spring and Fall and lots of people love the Winters.
I grew up in the Salt Lake Valley. The land is amazing, the people not so much. Not sure how this whitewashing of history ended up on the front page but I find it amusing that the author consistently uses quotes around "Mormons". Another commenter in this thread referred to them as a minority. Well, if you live in Utah, then they are no minority and you are living under their thumb. Especially in the author's town of Cedar City. Yikes.
They are a religious minority with a long history of being persecuted. And Muslims are a majority in Hamtramck and Black people are a majority in Baltimore—that doesn’t change that they’re properly called minorities in the US.
I didn’t mean this in a negative way at all. After wading in that lake it’s just remarkable to me how you can create a bustling city out of that environment. Where I come from food literally grows everywhere; it jumps from the river into your nets.
The Great Salt Lake is not only shrinking/drying, but there's concern over the exposure of dangerous elements that was once underwater
> Layers of earth that were formerly underwater have swirled into dust clouds laced with calcium, sulphur and arsenic, a naturally occurring element linked to cancer and birth defects. Exposed lakebed is also contaminated with residue from copper and silver mining.
> "If you breathe that dust over an extended period of time, like decades or longer, then it can lead to increases in different types of cancer, like lung cancer, bladder cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and such," Perry, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told Reuters on a recent morning on Farmington Bay.
> More than just humans are endangered. Underwater reef-like structures host a micro-organism that is food for brine shrimp, in turn an important food for birds, but the structures dry out and turn gray when exposed.
The GSL is also largely responsible for the famous Utah ski resorts
Without the lake effect producing all that snow, Utah's ski industry is in jeopardy. Without the ski industry, a very large portion of Northern Utah's desirability as a place to live goes away'
