Utah Attractions - The Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake is the most conspicuous natural feature of the Rocky Mountains. It is America’s Dead Sea and is seven times as large as the Dead Sea. Once the Great Salt Lake was much larger and was a fresh water lake. The lake at that period is referred to as Lake Bonneville and covered a large portion of Utah and parts of Idaho and Nevada.
During the Lake Bonneville era the fresh water streams flowed into it as they do now, but the lake in turn emptied into the fresh-water Columbia River which carried the water to the Pacific. Because the lake had an outlet the salt content was low. The horizontal markings of the Bonneville shore-line can still be clearly seen all along the mountains of the Wasatch front. As the lake grew too small to reach the outlet it became saltier and saltier.
Other Utah attractions near Salt Lake include: The State Capitol Building, LDS Temple Square, Utah’s Hogle Zoo, Historic Trolley Square, The Governor’s Mansion, Fort Douglas Military Museum, Cathedral of the Madeleine, The Living Planet Aquarium, Memory Grove Park, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Utah Museum of Natural History, Old Deseret Village and the Energy Solutions Arena (Home of the Utah Jazz).