heidikins.com

In Mandarin Chinese, the character for America is supposed to resemble a buffalo.  Kind of.  If you squint at it a bit and pretend it’s a stick-figure buffalo.  Somehow this always makes me smile–America, land of all sorts of things, is represented by a quickly fading icon of the American West.

Have you ever seen a buffalo in real life?  Not at the zoo, but in the wild? I have, but I happen to life Out West where buffalo roam freely.  Ok, that’s not entirely true, but there was a family who raised buffalo in my hometown and I would gawk at them all the time.  They’re just SO BIG and HAIRY and WOOLLY MAMMOTH looking!  They are bizarre.  But, looking at buffalo in a pasture in the middle of a neighborhood is a bit different than seeing them in the wild for reals.  But, on Antelope Island–the largest island in The Great Salt Lake–there is a fairly giant herd of buffalo, and I have gone to visit them twice now.  The first time was for an Environmental Science class field trip when I was in high school, and the second was for another field trip of sorts to watch the sun set over the Great Salt Lake from the shores of Antelope Island.

It was just a week or two after the Buffalo Round-Up and I was hoping to see a lot of the herd.  I did not.  I only saw one, lone buffalo, minding it’s own business and being very bison-like; you know, eating and grazing and ignoring the raving idiot 20-somethings that were gawking at it.  Quite bison-like.

We parked on the east side of the island and had a bit of a walk to get around to the west side before the sun set.  The hike was lovely, I sometimes just can’t get over the natural beauty of my state.  There was a faintly marked trail meandering through some fairly intense rocks, and after an hour or so we made it down to the water.

The Great Salt Lake is somewhat infamous for “Lake Stink”, which is this overpowering stench of sulphur that wafts over the Salt Lake valley if the wind is coming in right.  It’s horrible.  It comes from decaying brine shrimp on the shore of the lake.  Brine shrimp are not something you would eat with cocktail sauce, they are minuscule little buggers that I am quite certain only live in the Great Salt Lake.  Lucky us.  That being said, Antelope Island does not smell like sulphur.  In a few places if you disturb the crusty salt surface you get a whiff of it, but for the most part it is just lovely.  The “main-land” smell is stinky, the island is delightful.

I haven’t watched the sun set for a long time–I was amazed at just how gorgeous it was.  I took something like 47,000 pictures and a thousand more mental snapshots.  The water of the lake turned pink, which doesn’t show up with my little point-and-shoot but was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.  Sigh.  Le Gorgeous.