Many among us tend to think of the Great Salt Lake as an unchanging if unfamiliar and perhaps pointless fact of life. The lake just is, always has been and always will be.
We often regard the Great Basin, that massive territory from Utah's Wasatch to California's Sierra Nevada of which the lake is a part, in much the same way. Valley and range, valley and range ad infinitum, unpeopled, underwatered and not particularly valuable, except for raising cattle and laying down lonely stretches of highway to get across it.But these are merely perceptions - and, some would say, misperceptions at that.
"Parts of the Earth's crust that were once regarded as at least uninteresting, or more probably as ugly, repelling and inimical," Elmo Robinson wrote in a 1938 Sierra Club Bulletin, "are now looked upon as bits of marvelous beauty, inviting and friendly."
That's a perspective reiterated in two new books of photographs and essays, "Seductive Beauty of Great Salt Lake: Images of a Lake Unknown" (Gibbs Smith, Publisher; $21.95, trade paperback) and "A Vast and Ancient Wilderness: Images of the Great Basin" (Chronicle Books; $45).
"Vast," as used in one of those titles, is an apt description of the Great Basin and of the land- and waterscapes of the Great Salt Lake, agrees Claude Fiddler, whose photographs are the raison d'etre for the latter book. However, his favored suggestions for the title were not ultimately selected.
"My title was `America's Lost Quarter,' " he says. "Or, I had a second choice, `Out Toward the Horizon,' which is actually a snippet from Stegner."
And far from never-changing, the region, and the Great Salt Lake specifically, is constantly changing, from his point of view, says John P. George, the Utah photographer whose panoramas and closeups of brine shrimp and tiger beetles are showcased in the other volume. The relatively shallow lake's gently sloping shoreline, for one thing, shifts from day to day.
"I've gone to the same place two days in a row, and it's completely different," George says. "It's different from what it was yesterday, and it will be different tomorrow."
Ella Sorensen, who wrote the 15 lyrical essays matched to George's photographs, believes the number of people who care about the natural world and want to preserve some of its wildness is rapidly growing. But even those who already love the lake, as she does, find themselves wondering what it is that has beguiled them.
Driving down the Antelope Island road with a colleague one day, she says, "I was just so overwhelmed by the beauty: the blues, the sky, the water. I asked, `Have I lost my traditional sense of beauty?' He said I hadn't."
Perhaps, she suggests, our senses occasionally need fine-tuning.
"I did a survey for the Nature Conservancy," she recalls. "It lasted six months during the winter: blue sky, blue water, gray clouds, the white snow." By day she would be beside the lake; by night she would head off to other jobs in the dark city. "My whole daylight hours were filled with variations of mist and clouds and sky, and these things are just incredible to me."
The project ended in March. The sun slipped north again. Tulips and green grass appeared in the valley, "harbingers of spring - and it was gaudy."
"It's like being addicted to chocolate," Sorensen says. "We get so hyped up on sugar - and on color. Take the bright colors away, and we can see the subtle beauty of the lake."
Nevertheless, the photographers and writers involved in these two projects do not seem to want to overpersuade.
In his foreword to "A Vast and Ancient Wilderness," John Hart recounts a drive across central Nevada on U.S. 50, where "the view was much wider than it was high." Soaring above the expanse of sagebrush are streams, meadows, alpine peaks and venerable bristlecone pines, he found himself assuring a companion.
"Then I stopped, for I'd caught myself breaking a promise made to myself long before not to misrepresent, not to sell short, one of my favorite regions of the world," he writes. "It's true, of course, about the tarns and forests, the cirques and snowfields and ancient trees, but these bits of Great Basin make up less than 1 percent of it."
People who love the basin, he adds, also cherish its endless pinyon-juniper and sage steppes, the bitterbrush and the Joshua tree, the desert peach and the desert poppy, the badlands and the saline lakes.
They also forgive the region for its seeming lack of hospitality.
Photographing the Great Salt Lake, which sloshes in a bowl on the Great Basin's eastern border, proved often to be a personal challenge, George says. Still, he returned scores of times over several years.
"Getting to the lake other than on Antelope Island or down by Saltair is pretty darn difficult, just to get to the water," he says. At times his encounters were downright dangerous. He and some friends were almost swamped by a storm as they returned by boat to a marina after camping on Fremont Island.
"We spent three days on Fremont, camped on the west side," he says. "We could have just as easily been on a desert island in the Pacific. We could walk over the ridge and could see Ogden, probably less than 10 miles away, but on the west side it was so remote. I could have spent days and days out there; it was just an incredible feeling."
A terrible storm arose, though, on the way back from the trip. "That last mile . . . oh, gee whiz," he recalls. The sudden winds came out of nowhere. "When we got back we were covered with salt because the waves were just coming over us. . . . To look back on it now, it was kind of fun - but at the time it was pretty doggone scary."
The great lake seems to have defensive mechanisms, he admits.
"It does try to repel us," with with the mud, the flies - and the smells.
Lake stink. Hydrogen sulfide. The odor of decay - and the nose-crinkling human reaction.
"Every time I read something on the lake, with very few exceptions - it's almost a cliche," says Sorensen, "I would see, `I went to the lake and I smelled the lake and it was awful. We should do something about it.'
"We talked about having a blank page in the book with that on it." However, for those who visit the lake frequently, "it's so irrelevant. We don't even talk about it."
"It is muddy and smelly - but that's what that lake is," says George. And to him the odor has become familiar, even, believe it or not, pleasant.
"It's like going to your mom's house and she's making homemade bread - it's like going home," he says.
More intimidating may be the vast expanses, though to George that is an attribute. As old perceptions changed and appreciation grew, he found himself attracted to the primordial emptiness - the feeling that man had not been here or had made no impact.
"I think it's the spaciousness of it," he says, "the remoteness." He's reluctant to use the adjective "austere" - then decides that austere has its good points.
Claude Fiddler recalls another journey, with Michael Cohen, who wrote the afterword for his book, and Cohen's wife. They were in Nevada's Fortification Range.
"We were absolutely alone. There was no one else in the Fortification Range. And I remember thinking: How many people were hiking up to Vernal Falls (in Yosemite National Park) that day?"
Hikers hike familiar trails. Mountain bikers gravitate to developed resorts. Climbers head to places popular with other climbers.
The Great Basin has thousands of options, but it will take a long time yet before people begin to appreciate what is there.
"And here's why," Fiddler says: "All you have to do is open up any catalog (promoting) adventure/
eco-tour-ism and people want to have their comfort accommodated. So, if they can have comfort and can see a representation of what they feel is wilderness, well, they're willing to do something about protecting or preserving it."
In fact, there is so much that is remote and wild about the Great Basin, it may be too much for most people to take in.
"I will make a bold statement: Almost all of them cannot handle it," Fiddler says. "Very few people can truly stomach wilderness, and that goes for new Grand Staircase-Escalante wilderness as well. The Great Basin is much bigger than that, and the places are much more unvisited than that."
Fiddler, George and Sorensen, however, are no longer among the strangers in this strange land. They've traipsed the deserted desert over and over, becoming intimately familiar with the moods as well as the topography.
Their devotion to these projects came at some personal cost, in time, effort and expense.
Books and publishing have little to nothing to do with their day jobs.
Though a veteran climber and photographer, Fiddler is an independent contractor. He lives in Crowley Lake, Calif., with a view east to the peaks and valleys of the Great Basin. He cannot make a living from his carefully composed photographs, he says. Though he has published before ("The High Sierra" came out in 1996), "there's no exhibit of my work. I can't afford to produce an exhibit."
George is a physicist. A Salt Lake area resident, he works for Allied Technologies. Landscape and wildlife photography has been a passion and avocation for 25 years, though his attraction to the lake came gradually, beginning about a decade ago. "I walked out on the mudflats several times in 1988, and something just started clicking in me."
A chemist and biological consultant, Sorensen, West Valley City, works for the National Audubon Society and manages the Gillmor Wildlife Sanctuary on the Great Salt Lake's south shore, among other jobs. "I am not a writer," she says - though readers of her enlightening and heartfelt essays would surely disagree. She has been widely published in magazines and newspapers as well.
All three have become champions of this outback "lost quarter" of America.
And, as the subtitles of both books declare, they have sought to capture "images" of the Great Salt Lake and the Great Basin, in both words and photographs.
The Great Salt Lake is not a high, tree-lined alpine lake, George notes. Even he had to overcome false expectations.
"When I started getting over my preconceived ideas of what a lake should be, it changed my outlook and it changed my perspective," he says. "I wanted to take on a project that was a real challenge and create images of something and hopefully allow people to see it in a different way than what they thought it should look like."
Both the Utah lake and the basin and range in general have felt the presence of man. Fiddler points to the groundbreaking work of another photographer, Richard Misrach, who has documented "the man-mauled desert" in such books as "Desert Cantos" and "Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West" - showing landscapes cut by highways and train tracks, scenes littered with debris and valleys pocked by aerial bombardment.
"I admire what Richard does, and I think his depiction is valid," Fiddler says. "I think my depiction is equally valid."
Many of his most spectacular images were made after climbs to inaccessible peaks or drives into remote places. But he does not discount beauty more easily encountered.
"Take the Yosemite Valley. How many have ever visited Yosemite, taking a picture with the road 10 feet behind you," he says. The result can still be a photograph of absolute wilderness.
Capturing the unusual beauty, and helping to preserve portions of it, is also a motivating force.
Although involved behind the scenes for years - participating in scientific bird counts, working to set aside wetlands, serving on committees - Sorensen says she did not decide to write a book until proposals were made to create a diked freshwater "Lake Davis" on the Great Salt Lake's eastern shore.
"That would be heartbreaking for me," she confesses.
The book and the collaboration were suggested by John George, she says. "John and I sort of took parallel paths to this."
Their goal, George notes, was to promote keeping the Great Salt Lake the Great Salt Lake.
They wanted to make a difference.
In an essay titled "Mistaken Identity," Ella Sorensen gives the gift of language to her adoptive lake, explaining to readers, "I am not a freshwater lake. I am a salt lake" whose waters are not headed anywhere else. Climate and a varying surface control the lake's depth and behavior, so "it is better to allow me space."
But there is still time for the Great Salt Lake's human neighbors to discover and understand its nature. She writes:
No longer should we be strangers living side by side.
Your acquaintance will give to my muteness a voice.
With your acknowledgment, my truth will be known.
For it is in your appreciation that the seeds of my survival lie.