STANSBURY ISLAND'S NATURE TRAIL MODELS FLUCTUATIONS OF LAKE BONNEVILLE

Stansbury Island, the second largest island of Great Salt Lake, Utah, is named for Captain Howard Stansbury who, in 1850, surveyed Great Salt Lake and environs. Toward the northwest tip of the island, near one of Captain Stansbury’s camp sites, are interpretive kiosks and the Bonneville Nature Trail, a collaborative project of the State of Utah Division of Forestry Fire and State Lands (managers of the lake and much of its shorezone), USMagnesium (owner of adjacent land and extensive salt-evaporation ponds), Tooele County Parks and Road Departments (donors of labor and maintenance equipment), the US Bureau of Land Management (managers of much of the public land of the island), and Earth Science Education (creator of interpretive signs and designer of the trail). The five major shoreline levels of Great Salt Lake and Lake Bonneville are visible from the site. Debris from the most recent, 1986-1987, high stand of Great Salt Lake litters the historic shorezone. Three kiosks present information about climate change, history, and resources of the island and the lake. The approximately 1 km nature trail is marked by thirty-three signs spaced at 30 m intervals representing a time-line of the past 33,000 years. The trail ascends and descends about 15 m. The rise and fall of the trail mimics, to scale, the fluctuations of Lake Bonneville-Great Salt Lake across its almost 300 m range. Participants in school-teacher in-service workshops enthusiastically endorse the trail as effective, kinesthetic, experiential, learning for K-12 and adults, including teachers, who are studying climate change, geography, Utah history, and scale modeling. Similar trails may provide opportunities to raise public awareness of geoantiquities and encourage the preservation of precious archives of Earth systems history.