Weather Makers
My first trail run of the year was on Antelope Island in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. The water is so saline that no fish can survive, and therefore there are no boats. Few campers had chosen to be there that weekend and thankfully, there were none of the bugs for which the island is famous.
It was fifty degrees and drizzly (my least favorite running weather) but I knew I would only get one shot at it. We were camping for the weekend to test out our new trailer but I knew we would be leaving when I got back to camp. Everything I had planned did not sound fun in 20 mph, rainy wind. On our pandemic adventure in the trailer, leaving wasn’t a luxury we exercised. We stayed wherever we were and made the best of it, which meant that on several occasions we were the only ones left at a campground. But that’s not true anymore.
“Even if the rest of my body is objecting, my ears tell me that I’m making progress one gravelly step at a time. ”
On this trail, I was touching actual dirt. I’d been running on snow since November, but now it was March and I was lower in elevation so it had already melted. It was my favorite kind of dirt too, the kind that sounds crunchy. Even if the rest of my body is objecting, my ears tell me that I’m making progress one gravelly step at a time. The sandy, circular bits of granite beneath my feet had weathered off rock that used to be buried on the bottom of Lake Bonneville, the historic body of water under which the city and most of the Salt Lake valley used to be covered.
Lake Bonneville’s shoreline grew and receded over thousands of years and now it’s the Great Salt Lake. Which is also shrinking, as shown by the informational sign in the visitor center about the historic low; it’s covered with a tacked-up piece of copy paper saying that 2022 was the new lowest point. This paper looks fresh and I imagine that there’s a Word document on the Ranger’s computer because this is nothing if not a lake of dramatic changes.
“It’s the earth’s crust pulling apart, and surprisingly pretty for such a violent tectonic rending. ”
The mellow trail loop took me around Buffalo Point but I hoped any sightings would occur at a distance. The bison had been introduced years before by a fellow wanting to turn the island into a hunting attraction. I kept my attention attuned for the animals but mostly looked at my feet during the rocky sections because breaking or twisting something this early in the season didn’t sound like the kind of spice I wanted in my life. During the smooth stretches, I looked up and around because the water of the Great Salt Lake has an unexpected greenish tinge that was quite lovely against the Basin and Range mountains that stretch through western Utah and Nevada. It’s the earth’s crust pulling apart, and surprisingly pretty for such a violent tectonic rending.
The closest set of these uplifts – I hesitate to call them mountains when the Wasatch Range was so much more significant and only one head swivel away - had a hat made of clouds. They dissipated and re-formed still touching the peaks, and I had seen this phenomenon when in Nepal. Of course, the Himalayas made these Utah mountains seem like anthills, but apparently size doesn’t matter when it comes to mountains making their own weather.
I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise because mountains project into the atmosphere, so of course that would interrupt air patterns. That means clouds leave and return, making bunny rabbits and dragons and flowers during their transformation. Or whatever other shapes we assign to them when we take the time to look. The anthropomorphizing of water vapor.
“They were both created by the wind, an element invisible until it’s pushing against our car windshield or finding it’s way between the cracks of an unzipped jacket.”
Just as I rounded the corner on Buffalo Point, something floated across the trail. It was about 10 feet above my head and at first I thought it was a remote controlled parachute. I scanned the rocks for the someone directing the object with shiny chrome joysticks, but none appeared. Only sagebrush and seagulls.
Looking closer, it was clear that this mystery object was solely subject to the whims of the wind. It wasn’t powered, and it wasn’t even being held anymore – it was a shiny, happy birthday mylar balloon. It was too high for me to catch so I stood still watching it float away across the water.
The balloon was in my foreview and the clouds the mountain had made were behind. They were both created by the wind, an element invisible until it’s pushing against our car windshield or finding it’s way between the cracks of an unzipped jacket.
The balloon floated, the clouds caught the edges of the peaks, and I ran past. When my feet touched the ground, they were touching the same rocks that were a part of the mountains making the weather. But in the suspension between strides, I floated like the balloon and like the clouds caught on the mountaintops.
In that suspension, I was within my own cloud. Each time my breath visibly exited my body, I was making my own weather too.
Inspired by events at Antelope Island State Park, Utah, on land belonging to the Ute people.