![]() "This thing used to be the size of Lake Superior," says Jay Quade, a University of Arizona geologist who has spent much of his life exploring these deserts. The lake's irregular tendrils stretched for 150 miles east-west and 250 miles north-south it covered modern-day Salt Lake City and reached across the Nevada and Idaho borders. You can spend half a day driving across Bonneville's dusty beds on Interstate 80, beneath hundreds of feet of vanished water, without ever coming up for air. That line records the shores of a massive lake, called Lake Bonneville, which once sprawled across the region. The same thing can be seen across much of Utah, inscribed into every mountain and hill like a celestial constant. Floating Island Mountain, visible to the east above a perpetual mirage, also shows this line. It snakes around every gully and ridge, 600 feet above the playa where the Donners hauled their wagons. A curious horizontal line runs across the range - a notch cut into the mountains like a railroad bed, visible from many miles away.
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