Journeys: Antelope Island, Utah - Solstice Sunset

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Antelope Island, Utah - Solstice Sunset

One of the best places to watch a sunset near Salt Lake City is Buffalo Point on Antelope Island State Park. An easy hike to the overlook provides an excellent view of the Great Salt Lake and several of the lake's other islands. Sunsets are particularly spectacular at this location because the usually calm lake acts like a mirror and reflects the setting sun's light at almost double the intensity of a regular sunset. The rugged and barren mountains surrounding the lake contrast with the ocean-like appearance of the lake and beaches.

Looking northwest across the Great Salt Lake from Buffalo Point on Antelope Island

Shawn, Roz, David, Katie, and I headed out to Antelope Island after work on Wednesday to celebrate the Summer Solstice and enjoy the sunset from Buffalo Point. To enhance the experience, we brought a lot of good beer, wine, and snacks to enjoy while watching the sun.

Katie, Roz, David, and Shawn at Buffalo Point

Looking east toward the Wasatch Mountains

Shawn and the Great Salt Lake

Spectacular lighting at sunset

Summer is by far my favorite season of the year. I enjoy the constant sunshine, the dry desert heat, and the extra hours of daylight the make it possible to go for long bike rides and runs after work. While the solstice technically marks the beginning of summer, it also signals the turning point toward shorter daylight hours and eventually colder weather. I wish summer would hang around as long as winter seems to.

Final moments of the solstice sunset

"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