The Great Salt Lake Desert (colloquially referred to as the West Desert) is a large dry lake in northern

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

, United States, between the

Great Salt Lake The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particula ...

and the

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

border. It is a subregion of the larger

Great Basin Desert The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada (U.S.), Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, a ...

, and noted for white

evaporite An evaporite () is a water-soluble sedimentary mineral deposit that results from concentration and crystallization by evaporation from an aqueous solution. There are two types of evaporite deposits: marine, which can also be described as ocea ...

Lake Bonneville Lake Bonneville was the largest Late Pleistocene paleolake in the Great Basin of western North America. It was a pluvial lake that formed in response to an increase in precipitation and a decrease in evaporation as a result of cooler temperature ...

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quantitie ...

deposits including the

Bonneville Salt Flats The Bonneville Salt Flats are a densely packed salt pan in Tooele County in northwestern Utah. A remnant of the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, it is the largest of many salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake. It is public land managed by the Bur ...

Description

Several small mountain ranges occupy the edges of the desert, such as the Cedar Mountains, Lakeside Mountains,

Silver Island Mountains Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical co ...

Hogup Mountains The Hogup Mountains are a small 25-mile (40 km) long mountain range located in central Box Elder County, Utah, United States. The range lies on the northwest perimeter of the Great Salt Lake, and also lies surrounded by the Great Salt Lake ...

, Grassy Mountains, and Newfoundland Mountains. On the western edge of the desert, just across the border in Nevada, stands Pilot Peak in the

Pilot Range The Pilot Range is a mountain range straddling the border of Box Elder County, Utah and Elko County, Nevada, United States. Lying 50 miles west of the Great Salt Lake, the range forms part of the north-west border of the Great Salt Lake Desert. ...

. The desert is cool during the winter and includes unusual plants adapted to the dry conditions. Most of the desert receives less than of annual precipitation. The salt crust covering the desert reforms yearly when the rain evaporates. The military's

Utah Test and Training Range The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) is a Department of Defense military testing and training area located in Utah's West Desert, approximately west of Salt Lake City, Utah. UTTR is currently the largest contiguous block of over-land superson ...

is in the northern portion of the desert. The lowest part of Juab County is located just south of the Dugway Proving Grounds, about northwest of the northwest corner of the Fish Springs Range.

History

During Jedediah Smith's 1826-27 expedition, Robert Evans died in the desert and in the 1840s, westward emigrants used the

Hastings Cutoff The Hastings Cutoff was an alternative route for westward emigrants to travel to California, as proposed by Lansford Hastings in ''The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California''. The ill-fated Donner Party infamously took the route in 1846. De ...

through of Great Salt Lake desert to reduce the distance to

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. The 1846

Donner Party The Donner Party, sometimes called the Donner–Reed Party, was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. Delayed by a multitude of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in th ...

's difficulties in making the crossing contributed to their becoming snowbound in the

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primarily ...

Howard Stansbury Howard Stansbury (February 8, 1806 – April 17, 1863) was a major in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. His most notable achievement was leading a two-year expedition (1849–1851) to survey the Great Salt Lake and its surroundings ...

explored the desert in 1849. In 1956,

I-80 Interstate 80 (I-80) is an east–west transcontinental freeway that crosses the United States from downtown San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area. The highway was designated in 1956 as one o ...

replaced the

Wendover Cut-off The Wendover Cut-off, also called the Wendover Road or Wendover Route, is a two-lane highway in the western part of Tooele County in the U.S. state of Utah. Stretching from Wendover to Knolls across the Bonneville Salt Flats, a part of the Grea ...

across the desert, including a straight east-west section for ~ between the Cedar Mountains to the east and

Wendover Wendover is a market town and civil parish at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated at the point where the main road across the Chilterns between London and Aylesbury intersects with the once important road a ...

on the Utah/Nevada border. Following a railway completed across the desert's

in 1910, the flats were first used as a speedway in 1914. The world records for highest land speeds are regularly broken here.

Recent discoveries

In July 2022, archaeologists discovered about 88 footprints had been left behind by humans at least 12,000 years ago using

ground-penetrating radar Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a Geophysics, geophysical method that uses radar pulses to Geophysical imaging, image the subsurface. It is a non-intrusive method of surveying the sub-surface to investigate underground utilities such as concrete, ...

(GPR). So-called 'Ghost tracks' by archaeologists, footprints absorb moisture and are only visible when it rains and disappear when dry.

Climate

The Great Salt Lake Desert experiences a desert climate with hot summers and cold winters. The desert is an excellent example of a

cold desert climate The desert climate or arid climate (in the Köppen climate classification ''BWh'' and ''BWk''), is a dry climate sub-type in which there is a severe excess of evaporation over precipitation. The typically bald, rocky, or sandy surfaces in desert ...

. The desert's elevation, 4,250 feet above sea level, makes temperatures cooler than lower elevation deserts, such as the Mojave. Due to the high elevation and aridity, temperatures drop sharply after sunset. Summer nights are comfortably cool. Winter highs are generally above freezing, and winter nights are bitterly cold, with temperatures often dropping below freezing.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Deserts and xeric shrublands in the United States Ecoregions of the United States Deserts of Utah Great Basin deserts Geography of Box Elder County, Utah Geography of Juab County, Utah Geography of Tooele County, Utah