How I Climbed West Mountain and Found Wilderness

Stirling Adams

“Come now! It will be on in thirty.” 

It was a late afternoon in early January, and our youngest child, an engineering student, was home for the holidays. The two previous afternoons she had walked the west shore of Utah Lake to watch the sun set. Upon receiving the text, my wife gathered three bags of skates, I found the ice claws and ice poles, and we hopped in our car. After a short drive from our home in Orem to the beach between Vineyard and the Powell Slough bird refuge, we found our daughter standing on the ice, powder blue coat outlined against the lake’s whites and grays. The three of us laced on skates, and with minutes to spare we rumbled over the water, west toward the Lake Mountains on the opposite shore. 

The ice was bone-rattling rough, the result of freezing, thawing, and refreezing amid rains, winds, and waves. On Utah Lake, the best ice for skating is in geographically protected areas. At Goshen Bay to the south, near where my wife and I first skated together forty-nine years ago as college students, it can be glass smooth. But tonight, we weren’t looking for smooth ice for hockey or distance skating. We were here to watch the sun set behind the mountains and the sky erupt with fire. 

We skated for ten minutes, and then it was on. Hundreds of yards behind us at the lake’s edge, there was a handful of photographers and a gaggle of families with small children who ran and slipped, laughing at the novelty of walking on water. They, and we, all stopped to watch, frozen by the scene above us. The flat expanse of the lake’s gray surface dully mirrored the sky, magnifying the impact of what was unfolding. 

My fishing and upland hunting companion, Charles, has been encouraging me to experience the natural world through the lens of a neo-animism framed by my writing of haiku poetry. The objective is to produce prose that de-emphasizes symbology and interpretation with brevity that balances evanescence and form to convey many things about a specific moment by saying very few things (unlike this sentence). But at that moment we were infused by a candescent orange in the sky above and the ice below—a glow that started in a white-hot blaze just behind the peak of the Lake Mountains. Instead of weighing appropriate kigo and kireji to juxtapose two concepts in a haiku, my initial thought was: “Thor’s hammer was forged in secret by the dwarves of Nidavellir in the heart of a dying neutron star, and oh my goodness we have found that star just behind the Lake Mountains.”

When I did sketch a couple of haiku, they ended up as:

Frozen Utah Lake – 

three giddy skaters rumble

into the sunset

And, thinking how the clouds looked as if someone had bound the straw-colored grasses around the lake’s edge to make torches, and then used the burning bundles to light the sky: 

Rumpelstiltskin spins

gold from sedge and winter cattails

along Utah Lake

Later that evening we would learn that precisely at the time we were skating, our middle child was having his own icy lake moment four miles to the south. He had been walking along the Provo River where it feeds into Utah Lake. In calm weather, we like to launch from there in kayaks for trips out to Bird Island, or to paddle among the reeds on the lake’s eastern edge. Twenty years ago, with thirty miles per hour winds and three-foot whitecapped waves, Glen taught me how to surf in a kayak there. 

Our son had been foraging for plants like purslane, cattails, mint, and sedge and rice grasses—wild edible plants he could come back for in the spring or summer. He saw a Mallard flopping in the water, trying unsuccessfully to fly. He thought it may have a broken wing. He stripped to his undershorts and swam out to it, thinking of roast duck glazed with balsamic vinegar. When he reached the bird, he found it tangled in fishing line and the treble hooks of a Rapala lure. He stroked its contour feathers to calm it. He unhooked it. He watched it fly away. By the time he swam back to shore his body was numb all over, and when we saw him later that evening, he was still thoroughly chilled.                                

In Utah Lake ice 

Mallard and man-child escape

an awkward dinner 

In the late afternoon a few days later, he and I were on the lake on Provo Bay, a round body of water two miles in diameter with an inlet a few hundred yards wide. It can seem like its own separate lake. From our parking spot near the freeway, the two of us waded, slid, fell, crawled, shimmied, and sloshed two miles out to the bay’s inlet. Much of the bay was covered by a layer of ice just thick enough to repeatedly hold one of us for a few moments, or a few yards, then break and drop us into mud with the just-right viscosity to make us wonder whether we could extricate a sunken foot or leg. 

Elmer-Fudd-like, our intention was to learn what there was to see in the way of ducks and geese. In the two hours before sunset, we saw well over one thousand birds. The Canadian geese were the easiest to identify, along with the single pheasant, the many mallards, and small numbers of redheads, green-winged teal, and goldeneyes. We thought we saw shovelers, gadwalls, and Northern pintails, but in the fading light we weren’t sure. I was stunned at how fast a small skein of green-winged teal flew. They maintained a tight formation as they changed direction at sharp angles to avoid the hunters lurking in the reeds.

That night I had difficulty settling on a haiku to dimly record our muddy avian venture on an afternoon that turned out to be the close of our family’s ice season on the lake, as the weather warmed quickly in the following weeks.

In Provo Bay

creeping Elmer Fudds were not

very very quiet

…

In Provo Bay

the muddy bottom surrenders

no prisoners

Stirling Adams and his wife were both born in Utah Valley Hospital, 3.3 miles from the eastern edge of Utah Lake. 57 years later, they live about that same distance from the lake. For many of the last 40 years, Stirling has fished, kayaked, or skated on the lake with family and friends.

TWILIGHT TEA PARTY

Juni-Jen Smith

Suffused in a predawn glow, Utah Lake conjures a particular enchantment. The sun has yet to tip its cup and spill golden milk over the Wasatch peaks, washing the valley clean of shadow. In the flux of periwinkle, past and future mingle with the present – guests at a pop-up tea party.                                                                                                  

I traverse a drought-expanded shoreline through this dream dance of time, shadow, and light. Old glass, fossils, stone artifacts, and other objects lie exposed, no longer in reach of the lapping waves. This waterline regression leaves an accounting, like inverse arboreal growth lines, in the sand.

My gaze follows these meandering moisture marks stretching the length of the beach. In the distance a fuzzy figure, the future, waves from an arid, empty lakebed. It is an everyday apocalypse – one of many the future keeps in its back pocket.

Possibly, is its sole reply. 

Turning back to the present, I attend to news from the night crew: impressions in the wet sand, disclosing the nocturnal activities of local fauna. Their footprints form an ever-evolving abstract, each creature contributing as brush, artist, and art.

Utah Lake itself is a footprint. Along with its sisters the Great Salt Lake and Sevier Lake, these dis-conjoined triplets are the progeny of a mammoth late Pleistocene inland sea: Lake Bonneville. I stand in its deep bed. The past suddenly rises before me, elevating the water's surface to its epic peak. Nearly 300 meters above, the phantom titan expands, drowning the familiar landscape for hundreds of miles in its liquid reach. Like a child in a sandbox, it molds the earth, shaping the mountainous playpen. At last it overcomes its cradle, launching a centuries-long exodus, inscribing a geological signature extending from Southeastern Idaho to the Pacific Ocean. This dramatic breach marks the beginning of the end for Lake Bonneville. Time boomerangs forward. The climate grows hotter and drier. An epoch of aridification continues to diminish the primordial pluvial giant. Its evaporating body gives birth to the high desert lands of Western North America, until only the three remaining daughters are left in the wake. 

All treading does not leave equal impacts. I reflect, following a set of prints that look like baby devil hands: raccoon. These diminutive impressions, punctuated at the tip by sharp little claws, grow faint in the shallows. I create competing wakes as I wade along. Within this rippling mirror, the past and the present grapple in similar confluence.

Lake Bonneville's legacy thrived for millennia in robust ecosystems that evolved around its three remnant lakes. Situated against the border of North America's desert lands, Utah Lake provided an invaluable freshwater resource for animals of all kinds. Petroglyph sites near the water indicate this lake has held a place of honor among indigenous peoples since prehistoric times. 

Impatient, the morning slices through the twilight with a blunt yellow blade, illuminating the remains of several carp littered among paper products, plastic, and soda cans. With their bony mouths frozen into a defensive O, these morbid witnesses seem to form a dot-to-dot matrix of evidence and accusation. An invasive species, Cyprinus Carpio, was introduced to Utah Lake in 1882 after native populations had been fished to near extinction. This opening “environmental” intervention, committed on behalf of newly arrived colonizers, set the lake on an altered course. We, as antecedents and ancestors, are left to puzzle and reckon.

“It's not your fault." I assure the carp, answering the loud silence of their protestations.

The future, always the first to leave the twilight tea party, offers a nod. For a half second it holds my gaze. I see Utah Lake returning to health and abundance. Humans expand their efforts to reduce environmental loading. They recognize the lake’s intrinsic value, how it transcends, outweighs, and outlives shortsighted economic benefit. They become partners rather than puppet masters in its stewardship.

The future blinks. Utah Lake grows heavy, burdened by further pollution, disrupted by construction, misguided mitigations, and commodification.

Possibly, the future whispers, fleeing the sun’s chasing ribbons, disappearing back into the horizon of tomorrow.

Always retiring, the past recedes with less flamboyance.

A family arrives on the scene, returning me to the present. A handful of children run gleefully towards this natural water park. "Look, a seashell!" shouts one little girl. She offers up the spiraled shell of an ordinary pond snail. Her hair, tossing in a thermal breeze, forms a black halo, backlit by morning light. 

I smile. The feather of hope lands softly. 

If time is an arrow shooting ever forward, it does not fly straight. I am not a physicist, but something in me says it spirals. On the shaft of time, we travel around to meet again at certain places: crossroads, tipping points. If we have learned wisdom, we can use the experience gained in the past to nudge the future towards a better tomorrow – less distortion, tipping the scale in favor of creation and sustainability. A tomorrow in which Utah Lake is the jewel of Utah Valley, reflecting the sky, the trees, the animals, and us – part and participants with her.

Raised For This

Laura Barlow Leavitt

My thoughts kept returning to the tenuous future of Utah Lake while I was vacationing with family in Costa Rica. Our first stop was a little surf town called Puerto Viejo. We fell asleep to the chirping of geckos and awoke to howler monkey calls. As soon as we unzipped our mosquito nets in the morning, we sprayed heavy duty mosquito repellant on every inch of our bodies before sweating it off a few hours later or washing it away in the sea.

My oldest sister texted asking how the trip was going. I replied: “Costa Rica is amazing, but being here is agreeing to sacrifice your living flesh to mosquitoes.”

She responded, “You were raised for this battle 💪🏻”

I grew up on the edge of Utah Lake at the end of a long farm road, in a large white rectangle house with aluminum siding. Our cousins lived next to us in a matching house. There were thirteen people in their family and nine in mine and our mailboxes both read “Barlow,” so we were sometimes mistaken for a polygamist community. There were more than enough mosquitoes for all of us. 

I was born in 1983, the year the lake flooded. Mom loved the great blue herons coming into our flooded yard so close to the house. They’re still her favorite bird. My childhood was old-fashioned. We never used mosquito repellent unless we had guests over or intended to be outside after dark, like on the Fourth of July. We played outside all day during the summer on endless fields and marshy lake edges. My cousins, siblings, and I climbed fences, dug holes, found clay for pottery, built endless forts, caught toads and snakes, pretended to fish with bent cattails, fished with set lines, waded and jumped ditches, clubbed carp that sucked on our toes, and pulled leeches from the bottoms of our feet. My mom would call us in for dinner but we already knew it was time from the changing light and the call of the red-winged blackbirds.

…

Our lodging in Puerto Viejo was situated on the edge of town, a recent build at the end of a dirt road. The lot next to it was bare and recently deforested. Stumps from enormous trees, sawdust and unhauled logs littered the space like a rainforest ghost town. I learned while reading to my daughter that many rainforests were here when dinosaurs were alive and that the quickest a rainforest can recover is twenty years. I also learned spider monkeys only live in old growth forests; recovered rainforest isn’t really the same. As we traveled through the country, I worried every time I saw a “Se Vende / For Sale” sign on an untouched lot. 

We encountered two endangered species: green sea turtles hatching their eggs on a wild beach at night during a guided tour, and great green macaws that just happened to fly over our heads while we lounged at the edge of a turtle-shaped pool. I know Costa Rica is concerned with conservation. I witnessed overwhelming respect for the wildlife among the Costa Ricans I met. But selling lots has never been a vehicle for conservation.

…

As I grew older, I visited the lake less. I talked about boys behind closed doors, listened to music, watched TV—what did I do with all that time? The lake felt like a constant, stalwart friend I took for granted, something I could visit if I needed a good cry. I introduced every new boyfriend to her with romantic, albeit smelly walks down to her ever-changing shoreline. I tested their responses to this wild piece of myself that not everyone got to see and know. But the lake’s changes became more stark during my infrequent visits. Where are the cattails? When was the last time I saw a snake or a toad? Where is the snake grass, or the milkweed pods we’d strip the silky seeds from and eat? What happened to the monarch butterflies? Are there still leeches? When’s the last time I saw a water skeeter? Is it just my neglect? Or is it the walls of newly built homes suddenly encroaching on both sides of the dead-end road where I grew up?

Since landing in the arid Salt Lake City desert a few days ago, after three weeks of visiting lush jungles, two thoughts play on repeat in my mind: “Water is life,” and “We live in a desert.” Utah Lake is the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, a rarity, a treasure, and it is the only thing that has made life possible for every civilization that has occupied our valley. How can we insist on the preservation of rainforests abroad as we decimate our own delicate ecosystem? 

The lake is home to wetland birds, fish, and mammals every bit as valuable as the animals found in rainforests. Many of our fish have already met extinction and a few are holding on for dear life. (Thank you to the conservationists who are working hard to restore the June Sucker.) The lake’s origins are ancient. It doesn’t look like Lake Tahoe and never should. If we dredge it, destroy it with housing developments, and suck it dry watering alfalfa to feed livestock overseas, we’ll never get it back. The lake carries a devastating history of exploitation. Can we finally see what we have in front of us and value her for what she is? She’s all we’ve got.

My mom and I haven’t agreed on anything politically for the last twenty years except this single point: Utah Lake should be protected, preserved, and restored as much as possible. Neither of us can stand the thought of living here without a home for the great blue herons.

With Eyes to See

Brittany Bunker Thorley

I had lived in Utah Valley for over a year before I found out about the lake. I went for a hike high onto the slopes that rim the eastern side of the valley floor only to turn around and be confused by the view below. “Is that a lake?” “Does the Great Salt Lake come this far south?” Even with my limited knowledge of Utah geography, I somehow knew that could not be right. Someone explained that we were looking at Utah Lake, the Great Salt Lake’s freshwater counterpart. I excused my ignorance, being a college freshman who did not have a car and rarely left the square mile that incorporated school and home. But I continued to puzzle over how such a large body of water could exist in such a dry landscape with so little public attention. 

Over time I would understand. Utah Lake had a reputation for scummy water and aggressive mosquitoes. When the lake did receive recognition, the headlines included the words “harmful algal bloom” and “do not swim.” If friends made plans to boat or kayak, they always chose to go to the man-made reservoirs of Deer Creek or Jordanelle. 

But I have found upon closer inspection that this reputation misses much. Yes, Utah Lake was a dumping ground for past generations, but it still hosts birds rarely found in suburban spaces—the great blue heron and double-crested cormorant. It is true that the lake’s infrastructure has aged, but it still provides trails that pass under giant cottonwood trees and past seasonally changing wildflowers. Even though Utah Lake is not beloved by all, I enjoy taking my children to the shoreline in the winter to see the strange formations created by the ice shoves and watching it in the dusk hours when the setting sun turns the surface into a million shades of pink and orange.  

When I first heard about the Utah Lake Restoration Act and the Islands Proposal, I was surprised.  I was just starting my second year of law school, but even then, I was familiar with the public trust doctrine. This legal principle recognizes the important role of water in society and creates a public right to access and use navigable waterways. In the United States, each state has the privilege of managing its public trust assets but also the responsibility to comply with public trust principles. One important principle establishes that the trust relationship is perpetual in nature, meaning that a state’s management must serve the public interests of current and future generations. If a state were to abdicate control of a public trust asset, such as through sale or transfer, it would fail to uphold this fundamental part of the public trust doctrine. 

The Utah Lake Restoration Act seems to have the public interest at heart. It was written to pursue ecological restoration and enhanced recreation at Utah Lake. Such projects, if successful, would certainly turn the lake into a cherished public resource that would benefit the public. But the Utah Lake Restoration Act intends to achieve these benefits by giving away portions of Utah Lake. In the case of the Islands Proposal, a project that would dredge the lake to create an array of islands, developers would claim one-fifth of the lake’s surface. Once in private hands, the state could no longer guarantee that those portions of Utah Lake would serve the public interest, violating the public trust doctrine.   

Article XX, Section 1 of the Utah Constitution says that “[a]ll lands of the State that have been, or may hereafter be granted to the State . . . are declared to be the public lands of the State; and shall be held in trust for the people, to be disposed of as may be provided by law, for the respective purposes for which they have been or may be granted, donated, devised or otherwise acquired.” This section concedes that Utah may not always maintain ownership of all state lands, but it also asserts that all transfers in ownership must comply with the terms under which the land was given to the state in the first place. For Utah’s navigable waters, this language attaches a presumption that any disposal of those assets harmonizes with public trust obligations in order to be constitutionally valid.  

Utah makes use of this arrangement. The state allows causeways, mineral operations, and privately operated infrastructure in navigable waters. These examples represent transfers from public to private property rights, but these uses either enhance the public benefit or stop short of impeding public use. A wholesale alienation of large portions of a lake into private hands is categorically different and not consistent with public trust principles. Whether the general public fully appreciates Utah Lake or not, the Utah Constitution obligate the state to manage it in keeping with the public trust doctrine, which cannot include large scale privatization. 

…

I find beauty in the Utah Lake that exists today, but I also look forward to an improved lake. I hope that Utah can find a way to allocate resources to improve the lake’s ecology and enhance its recreational offerings, but I believe that progress can come without the public giving up rights to its navigable waterway. Utah Lake is a valuable natural resource with vast potential, and, with a little effort, more will come to see the allure of what has been here all along.