Introduction

Fazal Sheikh

My first encounter with Great Salt Lake was in the summer of 1987, during a journey from New York City to the Southwest in the days following the death of my mother. For several weeks, traveling alone, rarely speaking with anyone, I crisscrossed the desert and drove along the shorelines of the lake, hypnotized by the landscape and its somber, restorative essence. In the years that followed, the solace of that time remained in my memory. But it was not until 2017, following an invitation from the writer Terry Tempest Williams, that I returned there. Terry introduced me to the elders of the Utah Diné Bikéyah intertribal coalition, founded in 2012 to protect their ancestral lands in Utah. In 2017, they were engaged in a struggle to defend the 1.35 million acres of Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah, which the Trump administration was threatening to drastically reduce. The coalition offered me a residency to collaborate with them, and over the next five years I worked documenting the toll the extractive industries had taken on the region and tracing the legacy of environmental racism that is etched upon the history of its native people. As my awareness grew, I better understood the threat that was being posed to Great Salt Lake by water depletion, and the dumping of toxic effluents into the flow of the lakebed. My conversations with Terry, who grew up near the lake and whose knowledge and love of the lake are exceptional, revolved around a shared sense that the health of this majestic body of water and its future viability was at stake.

In November 2022, the lake reached its lowest ebb on record, with drastic increases in the levels of salinity to the point where scientists predicted its imminent death. It was then that Terry and I spent several days circumnavigating the lake, witnessing the fragility of this ecosystem at its pivotal moment. Our journey took us along the lake shore by car and on foot as we spent days in observation and conversation. When we parted, Terry made her way back to the East Coast to teach, while I stayed on beside the lake. By this time, winter had taken firm hold, with fierce winds buffeting the land and visibility often reduced to a few feet. I passed the days walking along the shoreline, waiting for an envelope of calm weather and the chance to view the entirety of the lake from above. Thirst: Great Salt Lake, and Terry’s essay, “Retreat,” is a record of what we encountered and of the body of the lake in the midst of extremis.

I am grateful to Terry for the gift of those days together, and what they taught us about this extraordinary place on earth. The year since our journey is now acknowledged to be the hottest on record, while the health and future of the lake remains poised in the balance.

November 2023