Unearthly beauty.
<Photo credits: Kate & Anne Wolf>
Full disclosure:
Though I’ve been through here before, I wasn’t along on this trip.
Beautiful, yes. But not actually sand.
Sand is silica. That’s silicone dioxide, a relatively inert material ground out of quartz and other rock flowing down from snow melt streams above. This stuff here? It’s pure salt, sodium and magnesium chloride. It’s precipitated from what once was seawater evaporated up from below. Get it on your skin and it will suck all the moisture straight out of you. There’s close to a hundred empty miles from the Great Salt Lake to the Nevada border. Most of that desolate expanse is filled with the stuff. There is nothing (I mean NOTHING) survives out here for very long. Well, except for a few hardy microbes. And maybe a few drag racers swilling Bud Lite. You know, guys with greasy gray pony tails and beer bellies. Each of them sports an oil-stained STP-logo t-shirt. And each of them aims to set the world land speed record. Hmmmm…. 400 mph and a nice little buzz on? Yikes! You enter this unearthly landscape at your own risk, folks: All’s I’m sayin’.
********
Oh, yeah – and microbes. Same, same.