{"id":2544,"date":"2012-03-27T06:15:14","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T00:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/?p=2544"},"modified":"2012-03-27T07:47:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T01:47:17","slug":"stansbury-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/2012\/03\/27\/stansbury-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Stansbury Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

Utah must be one of the best places on earth for hiking.\u00a0 That said, there are not so many good options in the north of the state in the winter.\u00a0 Looking through the book, \u201c60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Salt Lake City: Including Ogden, Provo, and the Uintas,\u201d I saw the recommended winter hike on Stansbury Island.\u00a0 Since I had so enjoyed my hike on Antelope Island the week before, I figured I would try this one out, too.<\/p>\n

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View out over Stansbury Bay and Evaporation Ponds<\/p><\/div>\n

Stansbury Island is a bit of a misnomer.\u00a0 Although it was an Island when the Mormon\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In fact, the southern portion of the \u201cIsland,\u201d where the trail is, is not even a peninsula, but only a set of hills on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.<\/p>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\nActually, the trail is also misnamed in the book.\u00a0 Whereas it is identified as the \u201cStansbury Island Trail,\u201d the Bureau of Land Management, which maintains the trail, calls it the \u201cStansbury Island Mountain Biking<\/em> Trail.\u201d\u00a0 From the signs at the trailhead, it is clearly managed as a multipurpose trail for cyclists, hikers, equestrians and shooters.\u00a0 In fact, there is a particular emphasis in the signs on target shooters, with notices about prohibition of exploding targets and about shooter\u2019s litter.<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Getting There<\/strong><\/p>\n

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(click to enlarge map)<\/p><\/div>Stansbury Island is not hard to get to if you know where it is.\u00a0 Just head west on I-80 from Salt Lake City.\u00a0 Some 33 miles from the I-15 turn off, you will take the off ramp at Exit 84 (Grantsville).\u00a0 You make a left at the railroad tracks and the road turns north (crossing the tracks) along the west shore of the island.\u00a0 This is the area of the companies that extract salt and other chemicals from the lake, so there are numerous evaporation ponds.\u00a0 I happened upon a train pulling up to pick up a load of salt.\u00a0 Some seven miles from the off ramp you turn to the right and the trailhead.\u00a0 If you continue on about a half mile you come to a mystery.\u00a0 There is a cattle guard and several signs.\u00a0 One says that you can continue on along this road to a view point, apparently at the northern end of the island.\u00a0 Another says, \u201cno trespassing\u201d and a third, \u201cno entry.\u201d\u00a0 What the real status of the property is, I don\u2019t know, but that wasn\u2019t my destination this time.\u00a0 Attached is a .gdb file you can use in Google Earth<\/a> or your GPS<\/a> to find your way.<\/p>\n

The Hike<\/strong><\/p>\n

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(click to enlarge map)<\/p><\/div>The book, which is excerpted (including the first two pages on this hike) at Google Books<\/a>, lists this hike as a 9.5 mile loop.\u00a0 However, the last half of the loop returns to the trailhead along dirt jeep roads.\u00a0 As that was not so attractive to me, I went out and back along the trail.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The trail is challenging only for the first 1.3 miles, in which it climbs some 700 feet.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Other than the ancient shoreline, which is quite visible, the country you pass through is pretty typical Utah scrub desert, and not particularly remarkable.\u00a0 The vistas out over Stansbury Bay are pretty, though.\u00a0 In a few weeks it will be blooming with wildflowers, I suppose, and that would be the time to be there.\u00a0 After warm weather arrives, I would not want to be there at all.<\/p>\n

Here are some photos I took on the hike.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Utah must be one of the best places on earth for hiking.\u00a0 That said, there are not so many good options in the north of the state in the winter.\u00a0 Looking through the book, \u201c60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Salt Lake City: Including Ogden, Provo, and the Uintas,\u201d I saw the recommended winter hike on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,60,58,63,57,59,51],"tags":[172,171,169,173,23,168,170,165],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2544"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2584,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2544\/revisions\/2584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/memmott.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}