The big stinky.

For today’s post, I will consider an issue that comes foremost to people’s minds when they think about the Great Salt Lake, and that is the stink. Because it’s difficult to capture stink in a photo, I am featuring flies instead. 

A young California Gull runs along the beach at the Great Salt Lake, raising up a cloud of brine flies and snarfing them up. The gull thinks it smells fine.

Why does the Great Salt Lake stink?

If you Google it, you will get a lot of information about hyper-saline environments, decomposing brine shrimp, hydrogen sulfide gas, etc., etc.  But if you hang out at the GSL enough, you will notice that the stink factor declines in direct proportion to the distance from the people.

The fact is that almost three million people live just upstream, and they produce a lot of sewage. It has got to go somewhere, yes it does. It goes into the great holding pond at the bottom of the basin, where it stews in the brine-shrimpy juices and occasionally gets whipped up by a stiff north breeze to sail into the noses of the residents of the lakeside metropolis, who wish the lake would in fact dry up so it wouldn’t stink so bad around here.  

I guess this should have been obvious, but I have lived here for twenty years and I didn’t put it together until just this summer.  Aha!!! No wonder the lake smells like crap. Up until the 1960s when some treatment plants were installed, it was raw sewage. Nowadays, it’s somewhat less raw. Medium rare, maybe? 

Notably, as the lake level drops to historic lows, the bone-dry playas have almost lost their tang, whereas the freshly exposed mud off-gassing in the 100-degree heat has become so ripe as to be almost intolerable. This poo hasn’t seen fresh air since the 1960s!  Combined with the natural fragrance of rotting brine shrimp and brine fly casings, it’s a perfect storm for stench.