300 Miles of Stark Desolation: A Guest Blog by Chad Harris

- Lake Level: 4197.5′ -

As someone who formerly loved to ride I have a lot of respect for our new friend, Chad. He seems to have found that mountain biking isn’t just a good form of exercise but that it also is a mode of transportation that can take you places you may have never dreamed of going. Chad Harris holds a professional mountain bike racing license and lives, trains and works in Salt Lake City. When the racing season ends the native Utahn enjoys exploring the shores of Great Salt Lake on his bicycle and in his canoe. Chad blogs about racing and thought provoking ideas, you can follow his musings at www.hooptedoodle.typepad.com. – Nicole

Let me make one thing clear from the beginning: The cycling opportunities around Great Salt Lake are terrible. There I said it, but it’s a lie. Great Salt Lake is the last destination in Utah I would recommend for a cycling adventure. For that Utah has Moab, St. George, Vernal and Park City. Those places have buff single track, paved rural roads, ideal weather and communities that cater to cyclists’ needs. Great Salt Lake has none of that.

Desolation (C) Chad Harris

Instead it’s got horseflies that bite through spandex, a complete and total absence of shade, awful roads that rattle loose every bolt on your bicycle, and the real possibility that the most minor of mechanical failures, or even just one too many flat tires could put your very survival in question. If anything goes wrong nobody is going to come to your rescue out there, and there are obvious reasons it’s such a desolate place. In fact, I once convinced a friend to join me on a ride around the Lake by promising him “300 miles of stark desolation.” With a tagline like that how could anyone resist joining me on a leisurely bike ride? Perhaps even more importantly, why should I or anyone else ever consider riding along the shores of Great Salt Lake?

The 300 miles of stark desolation in question were my first adventure in circumnavigating the Lake.

Until somebody can prove otherwise, I will confidently say my friend and I were the first people ever to circle the Lake on bikes. The route is a mix of every kind of path, from interstate highway to faded cow trail. We camped one night next to the railroad tracks of the Lucin Cutoff and were awakened hourly by passing trains. We ran out of water just in time to discover that the flowing well in Kelton has not flowed for years. Our friendship almost ended over an incident involving a block of cheese and someone’s lack of willpower.

And those are just the highlights of the trip.

There were also plenty of moments—like the endless miles of washboard gravel roads southwest of Kelton—we would rather forget but never will. Therein lies the answer to why I ride around Great Salt Lake:

Everything about riding out there is unforgettable except the riding itself.

Like meditation where one trains the mind to be still in order to send it to unimaginable places, riding in such desolate country amplifies the rest of the riding experience.

On that first ride we stood, tired and thirsty, on the western shore of the Lake and stared into miles of emptiness in every direction. We did not have to speak to acknowledge we were sharing a spiritual experience that would not have happened if we had taken any vehicle other than our bicycles to get there.

Another ride took us directly west from Salt Lake City to the southern tip of Antelope Island, where I removed about six dozen thorns from my tires upon arrival. The sun beat down on me as I used tweezers to pull thorns out one by one and seared into my psyche the importance of preparedness. We completed that loop by riding north to the causeway the other 99.9% of island visitors use and then south again through the suburbs of Davis County, all while praying my tires wouldn’t go flat again because we had no pump and had used the last of our CO2 cartridges.

Causeway & Birds (c) Chad Harris

I also ride the Lake to experience irony and paradox. One time we pointed our wheels west on 12th Street in Ogden and pedaled without turning until we got to the west end of the Lucin Cutoff at Lake Shore, 35 miles across the Lake. The view of the Wasatch Front from the center of the Lake is a pleasure only a select few railroad employees, sailors and intrepid wanderers like us have had.

I dare you to have it for yourself.

We ate lunch in the sun on some rocks and counted the fossil remains from Lake Bonneville under our feet—evidence of life was everywhere but ironically we were the only living things in sight. Before pedaling back we cached six gallons of drinking water we would need for an upcoming ride. On our return two weeks later we discovered someone, or something, had moved two of our bottles but didn’t harm them. Whoever or whatever it was must share our understanding of the paradox of being parched on the edge of a desert oasis that is unique to Great Salt Lake.

That return trip a few weeks later was another attempt to circumnavigate the Lake. This time our route was shorter but we still didn’t make it because we had only three days to ride instead of four. We didn’t reach our water cache on the first day so we had to beg water from some construction workers at the Titanium plant recently built next to US Magnesium.

We camped that night downwind of that plant’s yellow chlorine plume.

The next day my companions left me alone with the rattlesnakes to fix a flat tire. Just as I was beginning to believe those workers would be the last humans we ever saw we missed a turn and happened on to a family having a weenie roast on their ranch north of the Lake. They shared their campfire and a little insight into their way of life: It’s the first time I’ve heard a mother ask her four year old “Where’s your knife, son?” We camped on their front lawn and appreciated beds of soft grass instead of prickly weeds and enjoyed belonging to society again.

Camping next to the Behrens Trench (c) Chad Harris

Meanwhile inside I was resentful because I was wasting this moment to let the isolation and loneliness of Great Salt Lake sink in.

Sometimes for me it takes 200 miles of riding along it to appreciate and empathize with a Lake that most people treat like a bastard child among Utah’s natural wonders.

That meeting of our minds (the Lake’s and mine) is what I had come for and the opportunity was slipping by while we munched on hot Oscar Meyer hot dogs. In the morning mother, son and pocket knife escorted us on a four wheeler back in the direction we had come and showed us where we had missed our turn.

This fall we plan to ride across the Lucin Cutoff again, but this time we will ride past Lakeshore, past Governor Bangerter’s pumps and past any place we have ridden our bikes before, all the way to the Newfoundland Mountains. We will climb 7,000 ft. Desert Peak for views of the Lake and of the craters left behind from the bombing at the Air Force’s Test and Training Range, but the real view we seek is the panorama of stark desolation that only the Great Salt Lake Desert can offer. There is no other place so vast, so empty, so open, so beautiful, so stark.

It is a perfect cycling destination.

- Chad