Continuing on our way west

We finally left the farm in Spanish Fork, Utah on Wednesday about 2pm. Traffic was heavy but moving well all the way up into and through Salt Lake City where we turned west on I-80 on our way to Nevada.

Garfield Smelter Stack west of SLC (it's a bit hard to see the stack against the mountain)

From Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennecott_Garfield_Smelter_Stack):

Kennecott Utah Copper LLC’s Garfield Smelter Stack is a 1,215-foot (370 m) high smokestack west of Magna, Utah, alongside Interstate 80 near the Great Salt Lake. It was built to disperse exhaust gases from the Kennecott Utah Copper smelter at Garfield, Utah. It is the 61st-tallest freestanding structure in the world, the 4th-tallest chimney, and the tallest freestanding structure west of the Mississippi River. 

Looking north across the Great Salt Lake

Morton Salt producing facility 

Information from Morton about their salt production (https://www.mortonsalt.com/morton-sea-salt-sourcing-production/):

Morton Salt believes that creating the best tasting sea salt starts with sourcing only from naturally occurring saltwater lakes, oceans, and seas that are open to the sun and wind. Never mined or mechanically evaporated, Morton Sea Salt is always produced through natural solar evaporation. The Sea Salt production process begins by drawing ocean, sea, or saltwater lake water into large, shallow ponds. After the water is collected in these saltwater evaporation ponds, heat from the sun and exposure to the wind slowly evaporate away the water, allowing pure salt crystals to form naturally. The salt is then harvested, washed, crushed, and screened to the perfect size. 

... located alongside the largest saline lake in North America - The Great Salt Lake, Morton Salt’s Grantsville, Utah facility harvests sea salt from the billions of tons of salt already dissolved in the waters of The Great Salt Lake. The natural replenishment of salt from local rainwater and snow melt makes it an ideal climate for natural solar evaporation.  

Another view across the Great Salt Lake (on the other side of the railroad tracks)

Along this area of I-80, it feels almost like we are on a causeway with standing water on both sides of the roadway.

Cargill Salt Plant in Grantville, Utah

Some of the salt piled up near the plant

Information about the salt production at Great Salt Lake from Cargill (https://www.cargill.com/story/the-great-salt-lake-is-thirsty):

The Cargill salt plant in Grantsville harvests many tons of salt each year, culled from ponds that span 10,000 acres just south­west of the lake. The facility, which runs 24 hours a day, has been there since 1901. Cargill has operated it since 1997.

Salt is carried into the lake by tributary freshwater rivers, dis­solved in trace amounts. As the water evaporates, the salt remains, trapped without an outlet. The salt plant pumps in brine—a mixture of water and salt—to the ponds alongside the facility. There, the water evaporates, leaving behind tracts of crystal salt for trucks to scoop up. That salt is cleaned, dried, and sorted by size. An array of precision machinery processes it for a range of uses: pool cleaners, water softeners, animal feed products, salt licks.

One of the concerns is that the Great Salt Lake is reducing in size -- see the Cargill page cited above and/or this web page that has a slider to see the difference in size between 2012 and 2022.

We ended our driving day with a stay at the Wendover Historic Airfield in Wendover, Utah. 

We had stayed here and visited the museum about 3 years ago.

Carl was reading reviews of a restaurant in the area, so we decided to visit it...

It doesn't look like much on the outside, but the food was very good!

We were glad to be back traveling again!