Spiral Jetty into the Great Salt Lake 

Many people make the 25 mile detour off I-15 through Salt Lake City to visit the Golden Spike National Historic Site; the place where Leland Stanford drove the final spike to create the first transcontinental railway linking the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads in 1869. But 20 miles of easy dirt road further on, and totally without any signposts indicating that it is even there, is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty reaching out into the Great Salt Lake; one of the most beautiful pieces of outdoor and natural art in America.

Robert Smithson created this in three weeks in 1970 with a small team, a backhoe, and a dump truck; moving six thousand tons of mud, basalt and salt to form a 1500 foot long anti-clockwise spiral pathway. He created this when the lake was particularly low and it became submerged in 1972 only to reemerge encrusted with salt as the water level receded around 2002.

For more on Smithson’s tragically short life and career – http://www.theartstory.org/artist-smithson-robert.htm