Geological Survey Bulletin 612 Guidebook of the Western United States: Part B

SHEET No. 16. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Lakeside (see sheet 16, p. 156), a railroad maintenance, construction, and quarry camp, lies at the west end of the great fill across the lake (Pl. XXXIV), only a short distance from the shore. Here white dune sand which has been blown back from the beach is piled up along the tracks. It is oolitic sand like that already referred to, and should a stop happen to be made here the traveler may find interest in examining a handful of the grains. To the south great quarry faces expose the thick beds of dark-blue Paleozoic limestone. To the north Strong Knob, which at the present lake level is almost an island, presents a bluff front of conspicuous white and black rock.

PLATE XXXIV.—VIEW EASTWARD ALONG THE LUCIN CUT-OFF ACROSS THE WEST ARM OF GREAT SALT LAKE. Photograph furnished by Southern Pacific Co.

Salt marsh lands on both sides of the track are sometimes flooded, sometimes covered with a crust of glistening white salt,¹ stretching away to the south as far as the eye can see. A mirage can nearly always be seen on these plains, the distant mountains to the south appearing to be surrounded by water, the ghost of the greater Lake Bonneville. (See pp. 97-99.) This area is a part of the Great Salt Lake Desert and is so low and so flat that only a small rise in the general level of the lake would reflood the whole area.

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¹The white incrustation seen for a long distance west of Great Salt Lake consists of chemical compounds or salts that are more or less soluble in water, all of which are popularly included in the term "alkali." In its strict sense that term refers only to a certain group of chemical compounds that have the power of neutralizing acids and have a corrosive action on animal and vegetable tissue. The most powerful of these are the lyes, the hydrates of sodium and potassium. The salts which incrust the desert surface are not ordinarily of this character at all. For the most part they consist chiefly, in places almost exclusively, of common salt (sodium chloride). In many places, however, they include also other readily soluble salts—Glauber's salt (sodium sulphate), washing soda (sodium carbonate), baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), and less commonly borax. More rarely in this part of the country the soluble calcium or magnesium salts are found. However, where the soluble (sodium and potassium) carbonates occur the salts in fact partake of the character of true alkali. The carbonates of sodium and potassium, being formed by the combination of a strong base (sodium or potassium) and a weak acid (carbonic), break up (hydrolyze) to a certain extent in solutions, and thus there is actually liberated a small amount of free caustic alkali. The water-soluble carbonate of soda, known on account of its darkening effect in soils as "black alkali," is very destructive of vegetation. The less harmful "white alkali" consists of a mixture of the neutral soluble salts, in large part common salt, and its presence, as the name implies, is indicated by a white incrustation.

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A water tank and section house at milepost 730 are at the end of a 52-mile pipe line. Drilling for fresh water on the west side of Great Salt Lake has not been successful. All the sandy stretches, both north and south of the track, are composed of oolitic grains, here mixed with some mud and heavily incrusted with salt, therefore not so uniform or so clean as those in the dunes at Lakeside.

Brown fly larvae and their cast-off shells pile up along the railroad embankment when the water is high, often creating an offensive odor. Sometimes they collect in such masses over the rails that they make the tracks slippery, actually interfering with the passage of trains.

Olney, a siding and signboard only, is situated in the midst of a bare salt-incrusted desert. Beyond it the railroad rises slightly over low gravel ridges, some of which show distinct beach terraces and gravel bars, marks of former higher lake levels. A few isolated outcrops of dark limestone project through the valley deposits. The railroad descends slightly to the level of the Great Salt Lake Desert again, and the route is bounded on both sides by barren areas of white clay, or playas,¹ and low dunelike or lumpy areas of clay soil. At milepost 718 is the beginning of a straight piece of track (tangent), 38 miles long, which extends to the junction with the old route around the north end of the lake near Lucin.

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¹A playa is a shallow, flat-floored depression, characteristic of valleys having no regular drainage to the sea, in which storm waters collect and evaporate. It may be a shallow lake or a salt-incrusted mud flat.

In his description of Lake Lahontan, Russell writes:

"The scenery on the larger playas is peculiar and is usually desolate in the extreme but is not without its charm. In crossing these wastes the traveler may ride for miles over a perfectly level floor, with an unbroken sky line before him and not an object in sight to cast a shadow on the ocean-like expanse. Mirages, which may be seen every day on these heated deserts, give strange fanciful forms to the mountains, and sometimes transfigure them beyond recognition. A pack train crossing the desert a few miles distant may appear like some strange caravan of grotesque beasts fording a shallow lake, the shores of which advance ns one rides away. The monotony of midday on the desert is thus broken by elusive forms that are ever changing and suggest a thousand fancies which divert the attention from the fatigues of the journey. The cool evenings and mornings in these arid regions, when the purple shadows of distant mountains are thrown across the plain, have a charm that is unknown beneath more humid skies, and the profound stillness of the night in these solitudes is always impressive"

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At Loy, a siding and section house only, the route is still bordered by bare mud playas on each side. A dark rocky range, the Newfoundland Mountains, juts out of the flat desert ahead to the south. These mountains were formerly islands, as is shown by the traces of old shore lines high about their rock slopes. The desert here is only a little—perhaps 5 feet—above the level of the tracks on the cut-off over Great Salt Lake, and a slight rise in that lake would again cover this extensive flat.

Another railroad siding and group of section houses situated in the midst of the bare mud desert bears the name Newfoundland. Two very distinct benches, marking higher shore lines of old Lake Bonneville, may be seen on the front of the Newfoundland Mountains (the Rocky Hills of some of the older maps) to the south, and the upper bench was evidently cut by waves into the solid rock.

At Lemay, a pump station with section houses, a long pipe line which comes from a spring in the mountains 27 miles to the north, reaches the railroad. This line furnishes an excellent supply of clear, fresh water along the route across the Great Salt Lake Desert. About 1903 a well was bored at Lemay to a depth of 2,340 feet. For about 1,000 feet the well penetrated desert mud like that at the surface, with intercalated layers of clear crystalline gypsum. Below this material the hole was bored in limestone and brown sandstone. This record is interesting in showing the depth of the former lake or desert deposits in this part of the valley.

Beyond Lemay the route continues through the barren playas. Beppo is a railroad siding and section house only. The view of the mountain ranges to the west, across the State line in Nevada, is characteristic of the scenery which will be displayed for several hundred miles. Ahead, somewhat to the south, is Pilot Peak (elevation 10,900 feet), at the south end of the Ombe or Pilot Range. This was a well-known landmark in the early days. One of the principal overland emigrant routes led around the south end of Great Salt Lake, then across the barren desert to the low pass south of this peak. The Western Pacific Railway follows nearly this same course. The route of transcontinental automobile travel now known as the Lincoln Highway follows that railway around the south end of Great Salt Lake and then swings southwest around the Great Salt Lake Desert.

Jackson (elevation 4,241 feet), Teck (4,289 feet), and Pigeon are mere railroad sidings and section houses. The route continues through the flat, low-lying desert lands, from this point on more or less covered with scattered patches of brush. Owl Butte, an isolated peak north of the railroad, is composed of lava (rhyolite), and its slopes show jutting ledges, which are probably the edges of lava flows. The top is in the form of a cap. Apparently it was a little island when Lake Bonneville stood at the higher levels and was sculptured into this form by the waves. At Pigeon a spur track leads off to a gravel pit, from which material is excavated by the railroad for ballasting along the track. The gravels are ancient beach deposits, remnants of the deposits laid down around the shores of the old lake at its higher levels. Generally these gravel beaches extend out from some rocky headland, the source of the rock fragments which, worn, rounded, and sorted by the action of waves and currents, were distributed as gravel and sand along the adjacent shores. The bedding of these deposits is irregular, showing that they were laid down by shifting currents. The source of the original material at Pigeon was evidently the lava on Owl Butte.

The Lucin railroad station is somewhat beyond the old settlement, where there is a store and a post office. Here the route leaves the Great Salt Lake Desert and enters a grazing country. Both sheep and cattle find sustenance in the sparse grass that grows among the sage, and it is said that over half a million sheep pass Lucin twice annually, going south to their winter range and north for the summer. Lucin is the point of departure for a stage line to Grouse Creek, a settlement 30 miles to the north. Beyond Lucin the railroad begins to climb more noticeably, and the stream beds indicate clearly that the surface or storm waters flow toward Great Salt Lake.