spiral jetty great salt lake

[huckelberry]

Morley's personal image at least for a few days is spiral jetty. I am inspired to ramble.
https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our- ... iral-jetty

Perhaps there are enough threads I have lost interest in that I am going to indulge myself in a bit of mental wandering . It may or may not invite fellow wanderers. There is a good deal of space in which to wander out there in the northern parts of great salt lake.

From a rough art historical point of view this item may be the big signpost for modern art, the end. Of course that just starts what some called post modern art. I find the jetty more interesting than the category post modern art which is somewhat like post mod literature or post modern philosophy or a particularly bland form of Mormon apologetics.

We have not heard from Blixa for some time. She is the board expert on Spiral Jetty. I have remained unable to have actually seen it. It being postmodern it has a particularly large foot in the realm of the imagination. I touch that portion. I have flown over the north great salt lake, driven by the area. I am familiar with the feel of the land. The jetty leads off to another spot in the landscape that might have a touch of mystery.

I was going to think a bit about a postmodern novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey. It is a book I found both emotionally compelling and quite disappointing. It is as if there is two books in one. The outside book is the plot with the family struggle and getting the contracted logs to the mill. I found the total of all that flat and disappointing. I never could care that much about the two brothers war. I could relate to the contrast of hard working folks and the academic brother with no callouses.

It is the total landscape ,land , river, logging, people. small town northwest reality which I found strongly drawn.The story telling vantage points shifts all around till you see this small world from all sorts of people points of view. One sees the ordinary and sometimes falls into the mysterious extraordinary. It is nature which becomes the subject matter, vast, lovely. dangerous life giving and death dealing. Does it add up to a philosophical revelation. No. In contrast it is like a kaleidoscope of lovely pieces which all fall down in a heap in the end.

For me Spiral Jetty looks at the same mystery. It is however quiet ,spacious. There are slow changes is the water level which change the artwork. There are plants and salt crystals.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I’ll check it out tomorrow and let you know how it looks up close, Mr. Huck.

- Doc

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Speaking of postmodernism, either on your way out to the jetty or back, you'll pass by this clever homage to Donald Judd:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Judd

Examples of his art, which is basically stacking forms on top of one another:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Donald+Judd+a ... &ia=images

Due to my 'basic bitchness' I can't really add any commentary to his minimalism, which is probably appropriate on some level.

The jetty is interesting in of itself, for me at least, due to its remoteness. Long story short you have to travel 15.9 miles on unpaved road to get to it, and this is after you've traveled a fair distance off the beaten path to find the end of the paved road. The road alternates between being relatively smooth sailing to very corrugated, rough driving if you're in a Toyota Prius. Happy accident, though. You pass right by the National Historic Site for the Golden Spike, and you get to see the Jupiter:



which was the train some industrialist took to the Golden Spike ceremony. ANOTHER happiness accident is you pass by a Northrup Grumman site where they build and test rockets that NASA uses. It was fun to drive around their property, expecting to be chased away by security, but you never are. Crazy how open the facility is.



Anyway. The jetty is a'ight.

- Doc

[huckelberry]

Well Doc, thank you for sharing. I got good chuckle out of the Jonald Dud sculpture.

[honorentheos]

Earth art is an interest of mine for a few reasons, personal and professional. I grew up in the Ogden area and we'd often go out to the bird refuge, and occasionally out to the Golden Spike NM when I was a kid for both grade school field trips and as a family. All of those years, I heard about Spiral Jetty but it was under water so we never went out to look at it.

I was in college when water levels in Willard Bay and the Great Salt Lake dropped enough that it began being rumored Spiral Jetty was going to reemerge after being underwater almost since it's construction. Once it actually emerged, though, the army had other ideas for me that delayed being able to get out to see it until 2004. My wife and I took our then toddler daughter on the trip to check it out, stopping at Golden Spike to catch one of the show times when they actually moved the trains and blew the whistles which our daughter loved. Then, as Doc said, it was a bumpy, kinda sketchy drive on an unmaintained dirt road out to the overlook a bit above the lake level where we first got to see it.

In 2004, the Jetty had just risen from a decades-long baptism and was reborn. Because it was novel to be able to visit after so many years it was actually kind of busy. There were roughly a couple of dozen people there, maybe 10-12 cars, all parked along the shoulder of the dirt road above the Jetty which made driving to find a place to park less ideal as well maneuvering to face the way out a bit more effort than I had expected. This was not something meant to be visited by crowds apparently.

But it was worth it to me. The rocks from the movie about it's construction I'd watched in college were now encrusted by strangely pink-colored salt crystals giving the entire setting an alien feel that the salt marches echo in their odd mineral-based color schemes. The pink juxtaposed against the blue of the lake only feet off of the Jetty's end at that time seemed to have been selected from the paint palette of a French impressionist rather than mother nature. This was completely unexpected and a surreal surprise.

Spirals in gardens are meant to physically reflect a journey of introspection, and this visit to the reborn salt-crusted Spiral Jetty also happened to coincided with my own budding recognition the LDS church was not everything I had been raised to believe it to be. Walking into the center of the spiral, reflecting on these rocks that had been covered under mineral-heavy lake water and only rediscovering itself while overgrown and encrusted from the experience of being under that water all those years through what we now know was the onset of a terrible drought, was a meditative experience for me that I felt reflected something of my own identity.

That said, to borrow words from T.S. Eliot:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

I have no idea what it would be like to visit today. It's been above water line for two decades now. I'm sure the salt crystals have either been eroded or changed, the lake is probably much further way, and who knows what my own current state-of-being would bring to the experience. But in that time, and in that place, it has a special place in my memory.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I have no idea what it would be like to visit today. It's been above water line for two decades now. I'm sure the salt crystals have either been eroded or changed, the lake is probably much further way, and who knows what my own current state-of-being would bring to the experience. But in that time, and in that place, it has a special place in my memory.

Well. It was a'ight. The water was, I'd say, 100-200M from the jetty. There were no pink rocks, just dark brown volcanic rocks. It was fairly busy with about 10 cars, and a surprising amount of young people (who oddly enough about half seemed to have such bad posture that they've developed small humpbacks - it's weird, man).

by the way, if anyone goes to the Golden Spike NHP, bring some hearing protection. That whistle is loud AF.

- Doc

[honorentheos]

I figured the salt wouldn't hold up for long and the water line was dramatically different in relation to the Jetty. That's too bad because the colors and crystals really made the experience memorable.

Did they improve the shoulder so parking is easier?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I figured the salt wouldn't hold up for long and the water line was dramatically different in relation to the Jetty. That's too bad because the colors and crystals really made the experience memorable.

Did they improve the shoulder so parking is easier?

I’m not sure how it was before today, but it was very easy to get in and out, and there was a parking area large enough to fit twenty cars easily.

- Doc

[honorentheos]

I figured the salt wouldn't hold up for long and the water line was dramatically different in relation to the Jetty. That's too bad because the colors and crystals really made the experience memorable.

Did they improve the shoulder so parking is easier?

I’m not sure how it was before today, but was was very easy to get in and out, and there was a parking area large enough to fit twenty cars easily.

- Doc

Going off memory, I recall there being a wider shoulder roughly where it was easiest to make it down the slope that seemed intended to be parallel parking. I'd say half the cars there at the time fit in that area and the rest of us had to make the narrow regular shoulder work as best as possible which meant taking up some of the road. So passing cars coming or going had to squeeze by a little bit. I recall driving past that point and then making a multipoint turn to get headed back in the direction towards Golden Spike before pulled in behind the line of cars parked there. I'd guess it was meant to have five or six cars able to pull off onto the wide shoulder and not be partially in the road.

[honorentheos]

Huckelberry's link includes an aerial from 2005 compared to now. They have definitely changed the parking and road since I was there in May/June 2004. It looks like the 2005 image shows a small parking area off of the road while the more recent aerials show the road has been turned into a large oval area I would guess is the parking area you describe that could fit 20 cars.