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

dry lake A dry lake bed, also known as a playa (), is a basin or depression that formerly contained a standing surface water body, which disappears when evaporation processes exceed recharge. If the floor of a dry lake is covered by deposits of alkalin ...

in northern

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

, 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, partic ...

and the

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

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 and the Wasatch Range in the western United States. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife ...

, 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 oce ...

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 temperatur ...

salt In common usage, salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl). When used in food, especially in granulated form, it is more formally called table salt. In the form of a natural crystalline mineral, salt is also known as r ...

deposits including the

Bonneville Salt Flats The Bonneville Salt Flats are a densely packed salt pan in Tooele County in northwestern Utah, United States. 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 ma ...

Description

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

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 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 superso ...

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 nearly died while crossing 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. D ...

through of Great Salt Lake desert to reduce the distance to

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. The 1846

Donner Party The Donner Party, sometimes called the Donner–Reed Party, was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California interim government, 1846-1850, California in a wagon train from the Midwest. Delayed by a multitude of mishaps, they spent ...

'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 primari ...

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

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 San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area. The highway was designated in 1956 as one of the ori ...

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, Utah, Tooele County in the U.S. state of Utah. Stretching from Wendover, UT, Wendover to Knolls, Utah, Knolls acr ...

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

Wendover Wendover is a 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 along t ...

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 geophysical method that uses radar pulses to image the subsurface. It is a non-intrusive method of surveying the sub-surface to investigate underground utilities such as concrete, asphalt, metals, pipes, cables ...

(GPR). In the "ghost tracks", as the archaeologists called them, the 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