In November 2022, the Great Salt Lake dropped to a record-low water level. That winter, dust blew off newly exposed patches of the lakebed, clouding the Salt Lake Valley for days at a time. Its particles were contaminated with byproducts of decades’ worth of human activities—including mining and smelting—that had both leached from nearby tailings ponds and been deposited onto the lake from the air. The lake’s water level fluctuates naturally, filling in the spring with runoff from the surrounding mountains and evaporating during the summer months, and rising and falling in multiyear cycles. But for the past ninety years, even despite an anomalous spike in the 1980s, it has followed a clear downward trend.

This is partially due to the increasingly dry winters and hot summers caused by climate change, but it has much more to do with upstream diversions. The lake relies on inflows from three freshwater rivers, and nearly two thirds of their waters are rerouted into dams and canals at dozens of points along their courses. Over 70 percent of the diversions are for farms, with roughly 80 percent of those waters going to alfalfa production, largely for use as livestock feed; the rest serve cities or mines and other industry. (According to a 2025 study, alfalfa grown in the Great Salt Lake Basin accounts for about 56 percent of its water depletions while contributing just 0.07 percent of Utah’s GDP.) In January 2023 a group of Utah scientists warned that, under the current conditions, the lake was “on track to disappear in five years.” The loss of the lake would cause widespread fatalities to invertebrates and birds in the surrounding ecosystem and expose hundreds of miles of lakebed whose fine dust could cause widespread, acute respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses in the region’s residents.

Last year Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, pledged to refill the Great Salt Lake by 2034, when the city is slated to host the winter Olympic games. But getting an additional 800,000 acre-feet of water to the lake each year—the amount conservation organizations say is necessary to keep the lake’s salinity within the range necessary for its invertebrates and the birds they feed—is no easy task. (As a benchmark, the city of Los Angeles, with four million residents, consumes around 450,000 acre-feet annually.) For years moving more water to the lake wasn’t really even legal. Only in 2022 did Utah’s state legislature approve what are called “instream flows” as an allowable use for private water rights, for the first time allowing rights holders to choose to let their water flow on instead of using it. Now, they must do so on a practically unimaginable scale.

Taking serious measures to refill the lake would likely cost more than Utah can afford, and for years advocates from across the political spectrum—from the Center for Biological Diversity to Mitt Romney—have sought to supplement the state’s contributions to the effort with federal funding. Still, given his disastrous environmental record, it was something of a surprise when, early this year, President Trump expressed a sudden interest in the lake’s welfare. “This is an Environmental hazard that must be worked on, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social on February 21. “I am dealing with [Utah’s] very caring Governor, Spencer Cox, and we are going to make it all happen! MAKE ‘THE LAKE’ GREAT AGAIN!”

According to reporting by NPR, it was Cox and Mark Burnett—the former producer of TheApprentice and current board member of the Great Salt Lake advocacy organization Grow the Flow—who had caught Trump’s ear. Indeed, when the president released his budget request on April 3, it included $1 billion for the Great Salt Lake. The proposal, which still needs congressional approval, would create a “comprehensive Federal program”—to be led by the Department of the Interior in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency—that would “make investments to improve water flows into and within the lake, restore ecosystems, remove invasive species, and address toxins in the lakebed.”

Utah leaders have proposed a range of uses for the funds, including $300 million to compensate farmers for selling or leasing water rights, $244 million for programs to conserve water in cities, $100  million for ecosystem restoration, and $190 million for “major engineering solutions.” Of these notions, the payments to farmers to lease their water rights are particularly noteworthy. If their dollar amounts resemble the payouts made last year to leave water in the Colorado River—about $390 per acre-foot—then the $300 million could just about stretch to 800,000 acre-feet, assuming the program had enough willing participants. (In 2025, by comparison, Utah lawmakers allocated just $1 million for water leasing.)

That would only cover one year of lake inflows. To keep the lake healthy, Utah would either need to allocate $300 million every year or come up with quite a bit more to purchase, instead of lease, the water rights. Still, the focus on shifting water from agricultural to natural uses nonetheless represents a major step forward in the way that the lake has been treated over time. For most of the twentieth century far-fetched engineering schemes occupied state leaders’ thinking about the lake. Government planners and private companies chased grand dreams of rendering the strange body of water profitable—most ambitiously, in a repeatedly resurrected plan to dam half the lake and transform it into a freshwater reservoir.

That scheme has never come to fruition, but its recurrence over the decades has much to tell us about how state officials have historically understood the lake: not as a delicate ecosystem to be preserved but as an unexploited resource from which profit can be derived. The same ideology underpinned the various development and irrigation projects that, by steering away water from upstream, have helped get the lake into such trouble. Only now, with more and more of the Great Salt Lake’s bed exposed, is the political clamor over the body of water no longer about how to unlock its utility but how to stave off the disaster of its disappearance.

For the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone people who lived in the Salt Lake Valley before Mormon settlers arrived in the 1840s, the Great Salt Lake and the waterways that feed it were essential to survival and an important part of religious life. The area’s Indigenous inhabitants collected salt from the lake and relied on riparian plants for food and materials. They also revered the waters’ more preternatural properties. “Shoshones bathed in and drank from thermal waters and used springside mineral deposits for internal and topical medicine,” writes the historian Jared Farmer in his book On Zion’s Mount, adding that “they sometimes buried their dead in mineral springs so that the remains would calcify.”¹

Early white settlers also saw the lake as a place of wonder. “We all bathed in the salt water which is fully saturated…such as to bouy [sic] us in a remarkable manner,” wrote the Mormon leader Orson Pratt in 1847. By 1875 construction had been completed on a train that ran from Salt Lake City to Black Rock beach, where visitors frolicked in the company of shorebird flocks and docile brine flies. In 1893, the church-owned Saltair resort was built directly atop the lake, a Moorish-style pavilion sitting on 2,5000 ten-inch pilings. “Bathers descended by steps directly into the water,” wrote Dale L. Morgan, Pratt’s grandson, in 1947.

The newcomers soon focused on the lake’s utility. Within months of their 1847 arrival, settlers began harvesting salt from the Great Salt Lake, which they eventually would send to mining camps around the West. Early Mormon leaders discouraged their acolytes from pursuing the riches possibly to be had in the California gold rush: “We are gathered here not to scatter around and go off to the mines…but to build up the Kingdom of God,” wrote the church’s leadership in 1854. But harvesting some of the lake’s abundant salts could figure as part of the work of building Zion. The church entered the salt business in the 1880s, backing the Inland Salt Company, which installed pumps and evaporation ponds and held a monopoly on salt mining at the lake until 1923, when it sold its holdings to Morton.

They also used the watershed to irrigate their burgeoning city. During their first summer in the Salt Lake Valley, settlers diverted City Creek, a tributary of the Jordan River, to bring water to their garden plots. By 1910 the creek had become the source for Salt Lake City’s water system, while nearly a million acres of surrounding farmland were irrigated by a thousand miles of canals stemming from the region’s various waterways. Core to settler society, this work also carried a religious valence. “Making the waste places blossom as the rose, and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits, was more than an economic necessity,” the historian Leonard Arrington writes in Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900. “It was a form of religious worship.”²

Before long, federal leaders sought to replicate this work on a broader scale. In 1902 the Newlands Act established what would become the US Bureau of Reclamation. The law directed profits from the sale of public-domain lands toward the construction of dams, with the goal of bringing as much land in the West under irrigation as possible. In 1903 Elwood Mead, the head of irrigation investigations for the Department of Agriculture, wrote that Utah’s territorial water law, adopted in 1852, “contains some of the best features of the highest development of irrigation law as it is now understood.” The reclamation agency set its sights on using similar principles of governance to dam all of the West’s major rivers, including the three that feed Great Salt Lake: the Weber, Jordan, and Bear. No longer to be wild and therefore worthless, the waters would be put to work for the benefit of settlement.

As the damming of Utah’s rivers got underway, state and city leaders began to consider a waterway they hadn’t yet exploited—the Great Salt Lake.³ In 1930 two civil engineers from the University of Utah wrote a proposal, “Putting Great Salt Lake to Work,” that suggested making half of the lake into a prefabricated reservoir by using dams to cordon off its eastern side, where the Weber, Jordan, and Bear all deposit their fresh snowmelt into two shallow bays. The Western half of the lake, in their vision, was to remain in its previous, saline state; they don’t seem to have made plans to deal with its gradual evaporation.

The idea prompted additional studies. In 1932 another civil engineer recommended a second option, diking off just one of the eastern bays to use as a reservoir. Salt Lake City’s municipal chemist added his own study, stating that, once the lake was dammed, it would take only two years to dilute its salt water enough for agricultural and municipal use. Energized, the city’s engineering committee hired a consultant from Chicago, Jacob Crane.

Crane supported the smaller of the two proposals, damming off just one bay. Though he agreed that Utah needed “more impounded water in order to realize upon its potentialities,” he also saw the issue that would trouble all future projects: even then, too much fresh water was being used upstream, leaving too little remaining to fill the larger reservoir that the original engineers had imagined. The work of the relatively new Reclamation Service was already having an effect. In 1931 the agency had completed the Weber River Project, which held back 109,000 acres’ worth of water for future farms instead of letting it flow on to the Great Salt Lake. “The basic problem is that of a sufficient inflow to compensate for evaporation losses and for withdrawals,” wrote Crane.

The state agreed to dam off one bay. “Planning Board Okehs ‘Miracle’ to Sweeten Great Salt Lake Water,” read a headline in the Salt Lake Telegram. They never followed through due to a lack of financing, among other concerns, but the idea didn’t go away. Twenty years later, in 1955, the Utah State Road Commission reassessed the feasibility of the proposal to isolate the entire eastern side of the lake, now calling it the “East Embankment Reservoir.” Yet they found that not only the larger reservoir but also the more conservative single-bay option had become unfeasible. By then, in addition to the Weber River Project, the Bureau of Reclamation had completed the Ogden River Project, which impounded waters that fed the Weber, and was finishing similar work on the Provo River, a tributary of the Jordan, in order to provide irrigation for 48,000 acres of farmland and domestic water for Salt Lake City and its southern suburbs.

Undeterred, the Road Commission sought a more favorable second opinion. While they were still drumming up support for their plan, however, the lake underwent a dramatic change. Since 1904 multiple passenger and freight trains operated by the Southern Pacific Railway had crossed the Great Salt Lake on a twelve-mile-long trestle that was crucial to the Lucin Cutoff, a new hundred-mile path that shortened the transcontinental railway journey by forty-four miles. But after years of repairs and bracing, the wooden structure was failing. In 1959 Southern Pacific replaced it with a causeway—a rock structure that was sturdier and less permeable than the bridge. It unexpectedly divided the lake into two halves, or “arms,” that quickly became “two chemically separate bodies of water,” as the Great Salt Lake Minerals & Chemicals Corporation later put it. The north “arm”—the area above the causeway—was isolated from the lake’s freshwater inflows, receiving only limited influxes via breaches in the rock structure. The area became far saltier than the lake had ever been before. Salt-tolerant microorganisms and algae dyed its waters vibrant shades of pink and purple, and salt crystalized into solid blocks at a rate that alarmed engineers. (In recent years, Utah governor Spencer Cox has ordered state agencies to raise the causeway’s berm further, introducing the prospect of sacrificing the lake’s north arm to maintain a lower salinity in the south.)

The causeway construction also revealed that those salts were more valuable than previously known. During the planning phase, Southern Pacific had drilled into the lake’s salt beds, taking core samples to ensure that they could hold up the structure. They estimated that there were over five billion tons of dissolved mineral solids in the lake, and that the lake could support not only its existing salt production but also that of numerous other potentially lucrative compounds: sodium sulphate, magnesium chloride, potash, and lithium. The uses of the other minerals had recently become clear with the technological advances of World War II: magnesium chloride for steel production, potassium sulfate for fertilizer, and lithium for—the companies thought then—swimming-pool cleaner.

The data, published in 1962, piqued the interest of mining companies, which started soliciting leases from the state. By the end of the 1960s, after a protracted legal battle between the state and federal governments over ownership of the lake’s shoreline (which had contracted since it was initially mapped), the Signal Oil and Gas Company, National Lead Company, Dow Chemical, Hooker Chemical, Lithium Corporation of America, and Stauffer Chemical Company and others had made mining claims to 97 percent of the shore. It’s because of this mining rush that much of the lake remains inaccessible to the public to this day.

While the northern arm of the lake bloomed with minerals, the southern half freshened. This caused consternation among the salt producers operating there—four companies that extracted over 250,000 tons of sodium chloride from the lake each year. When salt concentrations diluted, they had to expand the size of their evaporation ponds and wait longer for the water to evaporate in order to produce the same quantities of salt as before. Partly as a result of this problem, over the course of the 1960s plans to shrink the lake’s saline area—this time in order to increase its salt concentration, among other reasons—once again began to surface.

Some state leaders supported an even more expansive plan than those previously ventured. In 1962, the year Southern Pacific’s mineral data became available, the State Land Board commissioned a report by a University of Utah economist that proposed drying up nearly the entire salt lake—leaving only a “remnant” maintained for some salt production and, it seems, old times’ sake. In the plan, groundwater would be pumped into three large canals leading to two new reservoirs located on the former eastern bays of the salt lake. Irrigated agriculture was more valuable than salt production, and the report suggested that those diversions would be able to irrigate 1.2 million new acres of “thirsty lands,” doubling the state’s agricultural acreage and providing new water supplies for industrial plants. The assistant attorney general pushed back, concerned that the plan would dry up existing farm wells and create vast legal headaches.

Utah leaders recognized a need for an entity focused specifically on these proposals for the lake. The next year, the state legislature created the Great Salt Lake Authority, which was given the mandate of developing the lake “to its highest potential.” The Kennecott Copper Company, whose smelter had been located on the shore of Great Salt Lake since 1906, saw an opportunity. The company discharged some 87,000 tons of slag—molten rock-like waste—per day, and had to impound these tailings in man-made ponds. Proposing that the slurry could be used for roads, man-made beaches, experimental agricultural plots, and dams, they offered the waste material to the Great Salt Lake Authority.

In 1965 an engineering firm contracted by the authority suggested using the Kennecott waste to create 40,000 acres of landfill that could become a resort-lined recreation area, and to build a series of dams to regulate the lake’s salinity. Among their proposals was to finally turn part of the lake into a freshwater reservoir; the still-saline lake to the reservoir’s west would continue to be used for mineral extraction. The Great Salt Lake Authority didn’t know where the estimated $24 million necessary for the project would come from, but it nevertheless began construction on a thousand-foot-long experimental tailings jetty on the lake’s south shore. Though the engineers’ report had touted the tailings as “a natural resource which cannot be overlooked in any plan contemplated to improve and develop the Great Salt Lake,” the project came to an abrupt halt when driving storms pelted their structure with wind and water. Three hundred feet of the jetty collapsed, as the Deseret News wrote, “flattened out like a pancake.”

In the 1980s a series of high-precipitation years that scientists have called “at least a thousand-year event” caused the Great Salt Lake to rise to what remains its historic high water level. The idea of using dams to divide the lake in half returned, now in plans to manage flooding, and soon state leaders were reviving old dreams of manipulating the lake’s salinity and of fostering a shoreline real estate boom. “There are 101 good reasons, besides flood control, for building the dikes,” one senator told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1985. Several years later a private group calling itself the Great Salt Lake Development Authority proposed “Lake Wasatch,” yet another plan to isolate a third of the lake for freshwater. Trumpeting it as a “Utah version of Lake Tahoe,” the developers argued that their new lake would be a recreation destination and increase real estate prices along the eastern shore. “We believe this so-called dead salt lake will come alive with the creation of this freshwater lake,” the group’s leader told the Tribune.

Where previous versions of the dam-building plan had stayed within the walls of state agencies and their engineering consultants, attracting little wide attention, this one played out in the court of public opinion. Dozens of opponents, ranging from duck hunters to the Salt Lake Airport Authority, wrote letters of protest. Some pointed out that the project would cause the lake’s saline western half to dry up, since it relied on the rivers’ inflow that would be captured by the reservoir. Additionally, studies had once again shown that with so much water being diverted upstream, Lake Wasatch wouldn’t receive sufficient inflows to be fresh enough for drinking or irrigation. Others complained about the tax burden of the $90 million project; yet another faction warned that in the event of an earthquake, a dam failure could unleash a tidal wave that would destroy significant portions of the Wasatch Front. They promised “the damndest fight you’ve ever seen” if the state followed through with the plan, and the scheme was dropped once again.

The high water of the late 1980s soon receded, and the lake was left to slowly decline. Decades of ensuring that the waters of the area’s rivers were not—in the diction of water law—“wasted” to their natural courses but instead put to “beneficial use” for agriculture and industry meant that there wasn’t enough water left for the Great Salt Lake to use, too. As upstream river diversions laid claim to more and more water, the lake’s elevation fell. Currently the water’s surface sits at about 4,192 feet—just several feet above its 2022 historic low. Following the West’s dismal snowfall this winter, some expect the lake to reach a new record low after this summer’s evaporation.

In 2024 the Utah legislature set some restrictions on industrial water use from the lake—still home to the Kennecott smelter and its tailing ponds, salt and potassium evaporation arrays, and a proposed lithium extraction site—and gave state agencies more latitude to make decisions based on ecosystem health. Ironically, buried in the bill, the old dikes appeared again—this time for conservation ends. Were the lake level to drop so much that it activated the “emergency trigger,” the bill deputized the state Division of Wildlife Resources not only to close off water flow to the north arm using the causeway but also to build and maintain “additional berms, dikes, structures, or management systems” as necessary.

Wayne Wurtsbaugh, a professor emeritus of watershed sciences at Utah State University, has called the strategy of using dams to conserve a reduced portion of a salt lake’s ecosystem the “Aral Sea Solution.” In 2005 the Republic of Kazakhstan used a dam to attempt to protect a small lobe of the saline Aral Sea, which was once the world’s fourth-largest lake but has shrunk by 90 percent in recent decades due to diversions for cotton. Yet it’s more of a band-aid than a real fix: the Utah scientists wrote in their January 2023 report that this attempt to “cut our losses,” as opposed to ensuring that enough water reaches the lake to maintain its historic surface area, would “sacrifice the pelican colony on Gunnison Island, shut down mineral extraction in the North Arm, [and] create a major source of toxic dust.”

The current funding proposal doesn’t get rid of feats of engineering altogether. In recent years, some lawmakers have suggested the literal pipe dream of bringing water to the lake from the Pacific Ocean or Mississippi River Basin; in 2025 Utah also created a “State Water Agent” to pursue interstate “water augmentation” plans. So far Governor Cox has focused his plans for the allocated $190 million on bringing water from a closed basin adjacent to the lake using pumps. He also recently supported a controversial proposal for a sixty-two-square mile data center at the remote northern tip of Great Salt Lake, stating that it would “actually return water to the lake.” (After public outcry, the investor Kevin O’Leary agreed to cut the project in half.)

But to reach the goal of bringing 800,000 acre-feet per year to the lake and to stave off disaster, it’s the changes to water law and the redistribution programs that need to be expanded, rapidly and heartily. Carried to the extent the lake requires, these policies would remap the way that water flows in the West. They would mark a kind of managed retreat from the alfalfa industry: where half of Utah’s water currently gets diverted onto the sector’s 480,000 acres of fields across the state, now much of it would stay its course, flowing through creeks and rivers and into the lake. The jarring greenness of desert agriculture would dissipate into brown; the desert wouldn’t cease to “blossom as the rose,” as the often-quoted Bible phrase has it; it would bloom in the way that that desert does, with sagebrush and Castilleja. Scaling back alfalfa’s footprint would, of course, be not just a profound environmental and geographic shift but a cultural and economic one: Utah’s nine thousand alfalfa farmers would face the dilemma of taking a buyout and retiring or adapting in another way. But the state will need to arrive at a just means of facilitating this recalibration, because the region’s future may depend on it.

The West’s irrigators planned for abundance, stretching water resources as thin as they could go. The idea to build dams within the Great Salt Lake, born from these extravagant promises of bounty, now exists for damage control. To restore the lake, and to save the region, requires a new ideology—one that allows water to simply be water.