|
Still nursing a
stress fractured foot I turned my truck west from the Great
City of Salt and headed to the
nearer reaches of Box
Elder County. With my foot causing some limited mobility
I thought what better than a nice drive across the Air Force’s northern
Military Reservation. I traveled here
a few years ago as part of a university field trip and had memories of a vast
steel graveyard of heavy machinery left to rust. So my planned mission was to photograph the
wreckage and return without a flat tire.
An hour and half outside of Salt Lake the Lakeside area of the Great
Salt Lake is a desolate area marred by Air Force bombing and railroad fill
quarrying. It’s a peninsula jutting
out into the muddy expanse of the Great Salt Lake. I left the highway and caught 15 miles of
pavement to the Military Boundary.
Here 15 more miles of desolate, poorly insulated, dirt road led me
though the heart of America’s
military machine. Finally through, I
wandered through dusty roads, vacant quarrys, and
cold rail lines. I paid the obligatory
visit to Lakeside
Cave- the temporary
campsite of Native Americans from the Archaic until the early 1900’s. I searched for the heaping graveyard but
found it only resided in my memory. I
wandered for a few more hours, hobbling between my truck and small buttes,
but finally decided to turn back east.
The drive back through the reservation was less intriguing than the intial, and I quickly arrived back on the bitument, one goal complete- no flat tire- the other
relegated to my memory.
4/6/2007
|
The initial warning as I enter the Military Reservation aka bombing range.
|
