
The lake is huge and can be seen quite easily from space. It's 75 miles long and 35 wide. The lake is salty because tributaries bring in a certain amount of salt even though they are fresh water and the Great Salt Lake has no outlet. Through evaporation, the salt remains.
The lake is too saline to support fish and most other aquatic species but brine shrimp abound. You remember brine shrimp. Their eggs used to be sold and hatched in kits that advertised, "Grow your own monkey fish." Ah, but I give away my age again. The brine shrimp are a great food source for many of the bird species found around the lake.

Each October the herd is rounded up and put in corrals to be checked and vaccinated and excess animals are sold often to those wishing to start a herd of their own. It is quite a spectacle as they use horsemen and helicopters to gather the bison and get them into the corrals.

The ranch was previously owned by the Mormon church and Fielding Garr was assigned to establish it so that they could manage church tithing herds. When the railroad came to Utah so did the Federal Government who did land surveys. The ranch was the only place on the island that was developed so the rest of the island was open to homesteaders. An entrepreneur named John Dooley stepped in and bought the island for one million dollars. He introduced twelve bison to the island to raise for hunting purposes. Eventually the farm turned to sheep and at one point was the largest sheep ranch in the west expanding its numbers to 10,000. When the operation became unprofitable they turned to cattle and then in 1981, the farm became a part of the state park.
The buildings show the history of the ranch farom the 1860s through the time when the park took over. You can self guide your tour and even try your hand at roping a steer--wooden of course.

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