How to Experience the Great Salt Lake

This place, this lake, is truly one of a kind. It's like nowhere else in the world. My name is Jeremy Shaw. I'm the park manager at Antelope Island State Park. I've been here since 2011. So Great Salt Lake Marina is super accessible, super easy place to get to Great Salt Lake. We've put in a visitor center. There's a gift shop in there. You can sit out on the patio and watch the sun go down, and there's a nature trail you can walk around, and it's a really, really good place if you want to touch the water of Great Salt Lake. If you haven't, you should. It is so salty that it actually feels different than fresh water. It's a great place to go check out what Great Salt Lake is, and you're right there, right in the meat of it. You're right on the shore. So Antelope Island State Park, it's the largest state park in our system. It's 28,000 acres, and it's an island, technically, in Great Salt Lake. We've got about 50 miles of non-motorized trail, so hiking, mountain biking, riding your horse. You can come out and recreate. You can come out and wildlife view, wildlife photography. We get lots of people that will just set up on the shoreline and paint. If you want to come up and learn about the lake and the geology and the things around, we've got a great visitor center. So there's something for everybody out here if you do come out. We are at record lows with the Great Salt Lake, and with no end in sight, really. What we've got to do is find a way to get more water into that lake. It's not just the lake, it's everything around the lake that gets affected. So as that lake bed gets uncovered, years and years of deposits are sitting in that sand, and those end up in the atmosphere when the wind blows. There are lots and lots of businesses that rely on the lake in order to make money in Utah. So the greatest snow on earth up in the hills comes from Lake Effect snow, a large portion of it. So Great Salt Lake is in the front of everybody's minds, and it should be. So when people come to visit Antelope Island or Great Salt Lake State Park, one of our parks, the money that they pay to get into the gate goes back into state parks. Not only do we get a chance to talk to you about the lake while you're here, and educate you about what's going on with it, and the plight maybe of the lake, and get you through the visitor center, and introduce you to some of the great things about the lake, we also use that money to do that in the future. And it gives us an opportunity to educate and contact the next generation of people that are going to help us save the lake. It's just a great place to recreate outside close to the Wasatch Front. I think it's magic, to be honest, and that's what I tell a lot of people. This place is so peaceful and so wild that when you visit, it changes your heart.