Last week or so, Noreen, Chuck, and I went for a flight to check out the landing strip at Spiral Jetty on the North shore of the Great Salt Lake. The strip is in bad shape, I guess some heavy equipment was out there for something and left some pretty good ruts across the strip/road in a few places. We could have put it down in between the rough stuff, but decided to head up to the Black Mountain strip instead. Anyway, we shot some video of our flight up and back with the wing cam. You can see some of the Bison on Antelope Island, someones marriage proposal written on the sand, the Spiral Jetty and the cool salt and pink water of the Northern chunk of the lake. It's really that color!

Nice video Alan!

that was cool!...It makes me "jones" for the West!

Nice Allen! I really enjoyed that. Very serene.

Otherworldly.

Cool track from mobygratis...great concept.

We saw that proposal too. Let me know when you come up this way to play!

Thanks everyone, it was a fun flight!

Those colors make it seem like you are either flying on another planet, or on a very polluted part of this one. I hope the pinkish color is due to some kind of algae or other natural material rather than a mess left over by some poorly controlled industrial or chemical activity. Seeing how barren it is around the lake, I guess it probably is natural. What does it smell like close to the water? The ocean beach at low tide in the summer can be pretty stinky from decaying seaweed and other nasty organic matter - is this the same? Are there any fish in that lake, or is it too salty for anything other than brine shrimp? Whatever the answers, it is a unique landscape that comes across as beautiful in your video. Thanks for it!

Flyhound wrote:flying on another planet

Be sure to put "Grand Prismatic Spring" in Yellowstone on your bucket list.

Great video!

CAVU

The pink-purple coloration of the North end of the lake above the causeway is the result of higher salinity (approximately 10x the salt content of the oceans) and the pigmented, salt-loving microbes that thrive there. The lake will stink sometimes, and people in Salt Lake lovingly refer to it as "lake stink". Usually there isn't a smell at all, other than a salty, sea like fragrance. There are no fish in the lake, it's too salty, but the brine shrimp like it that way. In 1875 some dude had two 35 foot Australian whales shipped in via rail car from San Francisco, released them into the lake, and never saw them again. Most people believe they died because the water was just too salty. Some say, and I'm not making this up, that they survived and had offspring, and every once in a while there is a sighting of the "north Shore monster". Some say it's one of the whales posterity, some say it's more of a Loch Ness thing. I've never seen it.

Nice one Alan, I need to get down that way more often, I kind of forget how cool that area is, and only an hour or less away for me.

I don't know the name of it, maybe others do, but there is a lake with a great turquoise color, very similar to the Yellowstone Grand Prismatic Spring, somewhere in between Kalispell MT and the now defunct Lang Creek Brewery, which used to have a grass airstrip, so yeah you could fly in and buy beer.