Utahns weigh in on condition of Great Salt Lake

Residents of Utah shared their reactions to the Great Salt Lake's dwindling water levels and local government efforts to intervene.

Several neighborhoods in Bountiful, Utah, overlook the Great Salt Lake. Many residents see it daily out of their windows, giving them a front-row seat to watch the lake's water levels decline over the years.

"We joke that now it's just a puddle out there," Julie Reed, who lives in Bountiful, said. "There's just little puddles, and we really haven't had the amount of water that we used to."

Shawn Stringham, a Bountiful resident, believes that the lake is definitely drying up.

"Oh, it's so low. Absolutely, it's drying up, there's no question," Stringham said.

Lowering water levels is impacting yearly snowfall, Reed said. She worries about the future if this trend continues.

"I worry about the generations to come and not having any drinking water," Reed said.

Efforts to conserve water include terraforming, which Reed's family has implemented in her yard, or foregoing gardening altogether. Stringham is among those who are furrowing their garden rows this year in an effort to do their part.

Stringham also believes that the lake is valuable for its connection to Utah's pioneer history.

"(When) the first pioneers came in here, that was the first thing they would see was this Great Salt Lake," Stringham said. "It's part of our history. It defines us a little bit."

Stringham said competing rhetoric makes it difficult to know exactly how serious the lake's condition really is now.

I'm trying to decide what's true, to tell you the truth, because we heard that there's all this possible radiation that will come from it as it's drying up," Stringham said. "And then I just barely heard that there's some freshwater spring underneath the Great Salt Lake that's huge, so there's a lot of confusion for me."

This wariness is a sentiment that is shared by Stringham's neighbor, Aubrey Guynn. He believes that local government is overstepping its bounds in regulating water usage.

"I just don't want the government to come in and tell us what we have to do to quote 'protect the lake,'" Guynn said. "The city put in these meters, and I see those water meters as the heavy hand of government trying another way to control our lives."

Moderating water usage during times of drought is important, Guynn said, but he also isn't too worried about the future. He believes that fluctuating water levels are part of the Great Salt Lake's natural lifecycle.

"I think there's a lot of things to worry about in this life and in life in general, and the lake is kind of low on my priority list," Guynn said. "Climate and the lake it's gonna do its thing."

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