Journeys: Antelope Island, Utah - Biking

Monday, August 15, 2011

Antelope Island, Utah - Biking

One of my favorite places in the Salt Lake City area is Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake. It can be reached by driving north from Salt Lake City and across a causeway connecting the island to the mainland near Layton, UT. The island is a state park and it's a great place to hike, bike, camp, and observe the Great Salt Lake.

Last month, Brandon, Kristen, and I participated in the full moon bicycle ride along the eastern edge of the island from the Marina to Fielding Garr Ranch and back. We had a ton of fun riding with hundreds of other cyclists under the full moon, so this month we decided to head back out to the island for the August full moon and camp overnight. This time, Grant, Emily, and Brad joined us.

Camping on Antelope Island

Flowers at our campsite

The bikes!

One of the best activities to do on Antelope Island is to watch the sunset at Buffalo Point, a short hike up the hill from the parking area below. The colors are always spectacular and the reflections off the calm waters of the lake make the sunsets even more unique than watching a sunset at the ocean.

White Rock Bay

Our group enjoying the sunset

Sunset over the Great Salt Lake

Sunset over the Great Salt Lake

After enjoying the sunset we hopped on our bikes and bike around the island towards Fielding Garr Ranch. It was much windier than last month, and the clouds obscured the full moon for the most part, but we all had a fun ride.

Our group

Biking with Grant and Brandon

Emily and Brad

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess