Larry Memmott's Blog

Utah must be one of the best places on earth for hiking.  That said, there are not so many good options in the north of the state in the winter.  Looking through the book, “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Salt Lake City: Including Ogden, Provo, and the Uintas,” I saw the recommended winter hike on Stansbury Island.  Since I had so enjoyed my hike on Antelope Island the week before, I figured I would try this one out, too.

Stansbury Island is a bit of a misnomer.  Although it was an Island when the Mormon  pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, by about 1900 the Great Salt Lake had receded so much that the former island was a peninsula, which it remains to this day.  In fact, the southern portion of the “Island,” where the trail is, is not even a peninsula, but only a set of hills on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

Actually, the trail is also misnamed in the book.  Whereas it is identified as the “Stansbury Island Trail,” the Bureau of Land Management, which maintains the trail, calls it the “Stansbury Island Mountain Biking Trail.”  From the signs at the trailhead, it is clearly managed as a multipurpose trail for cyclists, hikers, equestrians and shooters.  In fact, there is a particular emphasis in the signs on target shooters, with notices about prohibition of exploding targets and about shooter’s litter.

Getting There

Stansbury Island is not hard to get to if you know where it is.  Just head west on I-80 from Salt Lake City.  Some 33 miles from the I-15 turn off, you will take the off ramp at Exit 84 (Grantsville).  You make a left at the railroad tracks and the road turns north (crossing the tracks) along the west shore of the island.  This is the area of the companies that extract salt and other chemicals from the lake, so there are numerous evaporation ponds.  I happened upon a train pulling up to pick up a load of salt.  Some seven miles from the off ramp you turn to the right and the trailhead.  If you continue on about a half mile you come to a mystery.  There is a cattle guard and several signs.  One says that you can continue on along this road to a view point, apparently at the northern end of the island.  Another says, “no trespassing” and a third, “no entry.”  What the real status of the property is, I don’t know, but that wasn’t my destination this time.  Attached is a .gdb file you can use in Google Earth or your GPS to find your way.

The Hike

The book, which is excerpted (including the first two pages on this hike) at Google Books, lists this hike as a 9.5 mile loop.  However, the last half of the loop returns to the trailhead along dirt jeep roads.  As that was not so attractive to me, I went out and back along the trail.  As you can see on the map, there are actually several points at which the bike trail crosses spurs of the jeep trail, so it would be easy to cut the trip down to whatever size you liked.  The trail is challenging only for the first 1.3 miles, in which it climbs some 700 feet.  After that, it is almost flat, following an ancient ledge which was, some 14,000 years ago, the shoreline of Lake Bonneville, the ancient, and much larger version of the Great Salt Lake.  Other than the ancient shoreline, which is quite visible, the country you pass through is pretty typical Utah scrub desert, and not particularly remarkable.  The vistas out over Stansbury Bay are pretty, though.  In a few weeks it will be blooming with wildflowers, I suppose, and that would be the time to be there.  After warm weather arrives, I would not want to be there at all.

Here are some photos I took on the hike.