Those who dare to drive out to it anyway are greeted with no less than half a dozen no-trespassing signs. The fence starts about 10 miles east of the canal and extends another three miles past it to the Salt Flats rest area. Some are deterred by a cable barrier that the Utah Department of Transportation installed along the northern shoulder of I-80 last year to hinder spontaneous pull-overs there and elsewhere along the highway. Two years later, the reality is that the canal isn’t as attractive as it once was.įew people visit the canal and even fewer play in it. “We try to manage expectations because sometimes those can be a little bit, you know, misaligned with reality.” “We try to take those opportunities to educate folks about what is safe, what isn’t,” Lyon said. So, when VisitUtah gets questions about where they can go to take a video like Taylor’s, the agency tries to direct them to alternate Instagrammable attractions, like the Great Salt Lake. And, many of the cars that go there end up getting stuck. In addition, people pulling off and onto an interstate, for which the speed limit is 80 mph, is unsafe at best, according to McCoy. A call and emails to Intrepid Potash were not returned. People recreating in the water could create both operational and liability issues for Intrepid Potash. Though the canal runs through a mix of private property, State of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) land, and public lands controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, it is leased and managed by Intrepid Potash. She said the reasons for deterring people from visiting the area are numerous. The Utah Office of Tourism must be reveling in the exposure, right? Not so much, said Bianca Lyon, the tourism office’s community and partner relations director. Two weeks ago, Instagram user posted a photo of the canal with the caption: “Yes!!!! Sign me up!! Added to my Bucket List.” Likewise, an aerial photo of the canal posted on the Nature account on Instagram, which showcases photos of, well, things in nature, received 123,000 likes. Typically Taylor’s videos nab little more than a hundred sets of eyeballs. So what if it was actually salt, not sand? Who cares that the blue color likely comes from a dye added to make the water evaporate faster? Beautiful people paddling on and playing next to a serene strand of water that stretches for miles through a beach as white as the shores of Mykonos. Taylor took out his drone and captured a scene straight out of a high-end magazine shoot. “So we stopped, and sure enough there was that canal we were looking for,” he said, “and people were out there paddleboarding and kind of swimming on the edges.” They knew they must be in the right place when they spotted, standing out amidst the endless expanse of white, a woman in a bikini. He and a friend drove out to the canal in June 2020 after Taylor saw a picture of the canal online and realized it was right in his backyard. One of those people was Scott Taylor, a hobby photographer and videographer from Magna. “And then once that hit, it was just like, holy cow, you know? Everybody was headed out there.” “Up until they posted that picture, to my knowledge, it was never an issue,” McCoy said. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A vibrant blue canal of potash, used to extract valuable minerals from rich brines coursing through them extends into the Bonneville Salt Flats, garnering unwanted recreation attention in June of 2020.
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