Utah - Day 9 - in the campground

Great Salt Lake State Park, Magna

Saturday, 9 October 2021

Late yesterday afternoon, the wind speed came up so high it was shaking the RV.  My procedure lately to watch TV has been to balance the TV on books, because the speakers are on the bottom of the frame and it's hard to hear with the sound muffled.  But with the wind as high as it was, I didn't dare put it on the books and instead just set it flat-footed, so to speak, on the upper bunk and turned the sound up.  And still there were several times when I actually got up to hold onto it, just in case, because we were rocking so much.  Made Lily peeved because each time she'd been sitting next to me on the bench and had to move so I could get up.

Then today, the weather was cold, very windy and intermittently rainy and dreary until mid-afternoon.  The temp never got out of the 40s today.  But those Utahns are a hardy bunch and many came out to visit this park.  When I went to the visitor center to verify my campsite tonight, I found a lot of people who seemed to think a day in the cold wind on the mud flats was just the ticket.  Anyway, the exhibits I saw taught me a lot about the lake, its past and its present.  Sorry about the glare - I did the best I could with it.

the cut off title read "Later Exploration"

salt from the lake

The high salinity of the lake allows an industry that extracts 2,000,000 tons of salt and other minerals from the lake each year, including about 400,000 tons of common table salt.

There's an actual brine shrimp industry here, with harvests in the fall.

see corresponding numbers below right

Saltair, in yesteryear

today's version of Saltair from the side

the only angle I could get from the front

It really was a gloomy day until late afternoon.
The bathhouse is on the left, while the marina is at too
low a level to be seen straight ahead.

There was an odd kind of beauty here.  My campsite
backed right up to the mud flats, which are the dark area
in this photo.  The lake itself starts way out there and
I just couldn't figure out why folks flocked here to walk
around on the mud.

The mine itself was some miles down the road.

The refinery was right across the street
from the park.

My photo of the refinery from the state park -
that's how close it was to us.

This was my first Utah state park, but I'm assuming it's a special circumstance, being on the lake, and won't judge the rest of them based on this one alone.  Still, this was an odd place.

The US Weather Service is forecasting snow for much of the state beginning Monday evening.  At that time I'll be somewhat farther southeast at Palisade State Park, where they expect to get at least 3" of snow that night, so I spent spent some time today trying to figure out what my options were.  Hard to know what choices to make without being familiar with how the weather acts here.

Of course, the dogs and I went out several times in this yucky weather - Dexter was always anxious to get back inside.  And in the middle of all this I managed to get 3 blog posts done.