North End of the Great Salt Lake

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North End of the Great Salt Lake

Taken from my Seattle trip at the beginning of the month. The color version of this is jacked up by the plane window. My processing only made it worse. I’ve been trying an image as black and white when I can’t get the look I want without days in Photoshop. The black and white version is so much more powerful than the color version.

In the upper-left of the image, the body of water is called Willard Bay and it’s a manmade freshwater reservoir. In the 1980s, the Great Salt Lake came right up to the embankment of the reservoir. In 1987, the state built these massive pumps to pump water from the lake (not the bay) out into the desert to evaporate. Fact sheet!

Here’s the gist from the Utah Division of Water Resources:

From 1963 through 1986, the Great Salt Lake rose nearly 20 feet, more than doubled its surface area, and increased its volume nearly three-fold. Almost 12 feet of the rise occurred since the beginning of 1982, attributed to excessive precipitation in northern Utah drainage areas that feed the Great Salt Lake. Inflow to the lake in 1986 was more than double the normal average. On June 5, 1986, the level of the south arm of the Great Salt Lake reached a new record historic high elevation of 4211.85 feet above sea level. The lake reached the same level again in 1987. At this modem record level, the lake covered approximately 2,400 square miles and contained more than 30 million acre-feet of water. For perspective, its expanse was only about 487 square miles less than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and the lake contained an acre-foot of water for every resident of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

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Affirmation: Let go of blame; yourself, others, the world, etc.