Ghost Waters

Great Salt Lake: Bear River Bay 

Brackish Inland Delta

The northeastern arm of the Great Salt Lake is known as Bear River Bay. The river that feeds it, Bear River, starts in the Uinta mountains of Utah, heads north through Wyoming then turns into Idaho before doing a horseshoe back around the Wasatch mountains and outletting into the inland delta of Bear River Bay and ending in the Great Salt Lake.

It provides 60% of the fresh water that flows into the Great Salt Lake, from snow melt, springs, and seasonal rain. Channeling through 350 miles of the Rocky Mountains, it is the largest river system in the US that never reaches the sea. A lava flow blocked it over 100,000 years ago from joining the Snake River in Idaho.

The bay itself is a vast area of brackish wetlands that is an important stopping point for bird migration, resting at the edges of the Pacific and Central Flyways. In the past it was home to a vast array of wildlife: bison, elk, pronghorn antelope, deer, wolves, foxes, big horn sheep, and the eponymous bears, grizzly and black, that the river is named after.

Great Salt Lake, Bear River Bay Circled in Turquoise

Bear River Bay Bird Refuge

"Water is the driving force of all nature."
– Leonardo da Vinci

Shoshone Homeland

The area is the home of the Western Shoshone Nation, who have resided there for thousands of years living in balance with the ecosystem and migrating throughout the area depending on the seasons. They called the river, Kui-o-gwa, which means Big Water.

Settlers moving west found the area to be a good stopping point on their journey to California or Oregon. Some decided to not continue and make it their home.

This created friction with the native people, because the settlers began to vastly transform the area, creating disruption for the wildlife and ecosystems that the communities depended on, causing starvation. In desperation the natives would attack farms and ranches in order to access food.

Owens Lake 1: First of the series, closeup of Owens Lake

Site of the Bear River Massacre

Historic Tragedy

One of the most tragic events during western expansion (native genocide) in the US, was the Bear River Massacre in 1863. The US military attacked and killed an entire Shoshone village. Indiscriminately killing everyone, unarmed men, women, and children. The killers held the belief of Manifest destiny, which was that it was their right to take over the land from the native people and murder them, because they were morally superior.

"I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered."
– Black Elk about the Battle of Wounded Knee

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." – Ernest Hemingway

Minerals

The bay has been greatly transformed from how it was before the arrival of the settlers in the mid 1800s. Looking at the painting I made of Bear River Bay, you can see that large swaths of it contain different colored pools in angular shapes. These are evaporation pools used to create sulfate of potash, a potassium containing salt, which is used as a potent fertilizer.

Being an extractive process it does damage to the ecosystem in addition to being a finite resource that will eventually run out.

There aren't many areas in the US with a natural supply of potash so collectively we end up importing around 90% of what is used on conventional crops. It is an energy intensive process requiring fossil fuel inputs to extract, process, and distribute.

Bear River Bay Full Painting

Natural Solutions

Another option to our reliance on this limited resource is regenerative agriculture that builds life naturally by replenishing microbes in the soil establishing healthy soil microbiomes. This is a solution designed for creating long-term health and stability.

Why am I painting these degraded waterscapes?

All known life on earth requires water in some way in order to live. How we treat the bodies of water that sustain us and all other life forms is hugely important for the health of everything.

Here in the western US water is a scarce commodity, which should mean that we greatly value it and do everything to ensure the water we need to survive is pure and healthy and that we think carefully about how we manage it and what crops we grow with this limited but essential resource.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. We spray pesticides and fertilizers on the land which then drain down into the water poisoning it and creating algae blooms of cyanobacteria that cause dead zones and destroy aquatic life and threaten everyone and everything that comes into contact with it. 

On top of that, pollution from industry goes into our waterways, we flush waste into our sewers from our toilets, bathrooms, and roads. Rainwater passes over landfills and cityscapes that then drain into our waterways.  And the Supreme Court just ruled that we don't have a right to clean drinking water.

Draining the water

We grow crops that are not native and require large amounts of water. Farm animals are raised in dry landscapes that require vast inputs of water for their direct consumption and to grow the crops that feed them.

Some places around the world are already stretched very thin on water or it has evaporated altogether. Lakebeds globally, like the Aral Sea, are drying up. Without intervention the Great Salt Lake is headed in that direction.

Restoring the water

People in the area are working to stop this from happening. It's actually a non-partisan issue. Everyone wants the lake to be healthy for recreation, for water, for healthy plants and animals and for a healthy community. Without water, dust full of toxic metals blows all over the region. The republican governor, Spencer Cox, has a plan to refill the Great Salt Lake, and he's set 2034 as the deadline, to coincide with the Winter Olympics in Park City.

There are so many environmental issues that are starting to close in on us simultaneously. How we work with water should be near the top of the list in conjunction with the climate crisis. Water is essential for survival and it can also be incredibly destructive. Too little or too much and there are big, big problems.

"Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans." – Jacques Yves Cousteau

Owens Lake - 2: Finished artwork

Vitality and Symbolism

Water has great spiritual significance. It represent the subconscious and the flow of life. We are cleansed and purified by the water. It also represents love. When we neglect it and pollute it we are poisoning ourselves on multiple levels. To have a healthy world we must tend to the water. Keeping it pure and clear nourished and heals us.

When we recognize the primacy of the water and its essential place in our lives we are compelled to think of how everything we do impacts it. There is a water cost included in everything we buy and everything we consume. How much water did it take to manufacture, to grow the materials used, what dyes or solvents were used in the making, what pesticides were used, what fertilizers? Asking these question takes deeper into awareness of our responsibility.

The interconnectedness of things makes it impossible to remove yourself from the picture and not notice how every decision you make has an impact. It is important that we make sure it is a positive and healthy one, not destructive.

"Love is the water of life, jump into this water." – Rumi

"Water, the Hub of Life. Water is its master and matrix, mother and medium. Water is the most extraordinary substance! Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery. Life is water dancing to the tune of solids."
– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi