Why Snowboarders Should Care About The Great Salt Lake
If you’re a snowboarder or if you live in Salt Lake (hey let’s face it, if you’re reading this you’re probably both) then read up. Egan Wint offers up some wise words for all you boarders out there.
Welcome to Salt Lake City! You may know it as the industrial hell scape that boarders of all disciplines have found themselves in. From the backcountry go-getters to the weekend warriors and to the street boarders, why have we all found ourselves in the middle of the desert?
We came for the champagne powder and the snow in the streets. We came for the “greatest snow on earth”. It’s hard not to notice how much of that has changed. We grew up watching videos with Salt Lake City being the cornerstone of the industry. We moved here to hit street one day and a back country jump the next. The powder days are getting fewer and farther apart while the snowpack becomes unstable. We flee the city for a better forecast in hopes that clips will follow.
Egg! Photo: Sierra Forchheimer
What happened to the greatest snow on earth? In order to understand where it went, we need to understand where it came from. As wind blows through the Salt Lake Valley and up into the Great Salt Lake. When the wet air cools down over the mountains, it drops that sweet, sweet powder, also known as lake effect snow. Back in the 1980’s, the lake was at its highest recorded level of 3,300 sq miles. Fucking huge right? In 2022 the lake will be less than a thousand.
The New York Times wrote an article that said this was due to population growth and climate change. That doesn’t even scratch the surface. The majority of the blood coming from the Great Salt Lake is on the hands of a few overly greedy, evil people. The old shore of the lake is dotted with corporations and industrial facilities that exploit the lake and have been for decades. Of the only four rivers that feed into the lake there are over 70 dams. Their foot hasn’t hesitated from the gas pedal towards total obliteration since day one. Let me put this into perspective for you. The dams are in place to collect water to be used for irrigation for mainly alfalfa farms. The alfalfa is used to feed the cows (don’t get me started on the cows) as for the corporations I was talking about, let’s zero in on US Magnesium. They opened up shop in ‘72. Since then, they have evaporated so much water in their evap ponds that the canals they use to bring in 100,000 gallons of water a MINUTE don’t even reach the water anymore. They had to file for an emergency permit to extend them. If you’ve seen the GIANT hole next to the lake, that used to be an actual mountain. The mine that has whittled down at the rock for decades has been dumping all their toxic waste into the salty waters. As the lakebed gets exposed due to low water levels, so does all the toxic waste. Instead of the wind picking up moisture to give us a frothy winter, it’s going to pick up lead and arsenic and envelope us in a toxic dust bowl.
What can we do? We can blow the dams. We can give the land back to those who cared for it since the dawn of time. Those are the people of the Paiute, Goshute, Eastern Shoshone, and Ute. We can put the power back into the hands of the people. If we want to keep the winters we all came here for, we have to start giving a fuck.
Written by Egan Wint