Both Pia and I have our hands jammed into our coat pockets to warm up. I decide not to-I can’t quite resolve how, exactly, such an action would be symbolic, and besides, it’s too cold. Briefly I entertain turning on the spigot, if only for a moment, thinking it how symbolic and meaningful it’d be. A sign welcomes us to the streaked white expanse beyond it nearby, a much more no-nonsense sign reading FOOT WASH gives motorists somewhere to rinse the salt from their shoes. We pull off the highway at a rest stop with an art-deco-adjacent swooping concrete shelter. I’d have to take my sunglasses off again. Sunlight doesn’t get through a thousand feet of water. I squint into the haze and try to overlay past and present, imagining that we are driving at the bottom of an inland sea. Here, over these blinding salt flats, the lake would have been a thousand feet deep. Former shorelines from that vanished lake cut plateaus across the blasted flanks of mountain ranges that were once archipelagos. Instead what greets us through the bug-splattered windshield is the quiet residue of that prehistoric lake: thousands of tons of salt, left behind over ancient millennia as Lake Bonneville evaporated into thin air. That flood-scarred landscape of southern Idaho is two hundred miles to our north. Where we are, however, shows none of this melodrama. The marks of this ancient apocalypse are still readily visible today in geologic time, they have not even had a chance to begin scabbing over. The flood reconfigured hundreds of square miles of geology in an instant, carving deep gashes into the canyon walls, scattering car-sized boulders all over the Snake River Canyon, and ripping vast pits into the canyon floor. What followed was nothing short of cataclysm: a thousand cubic miles of water passing through Red Rock Pass in less than a year. At its maximum level, the prehistoric lake crossed into southeastern Idaho and broke through a natural dam that had been holding it back. The Great Salt Lake is all that remains of Lake Bonneville, an ancient freshwater lake that once covered nearly a quarter of Utah.
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