Pilgramage to the Spiral Jetty

I've decided to kick off this blog by writting about my "conceptual pilgrimage" to the Spiral Jetty last week. It seems like I have been having dreams about it for years since I first learned about it in 7th grade Art. I don't know what the facination with it has been in my sub-consious mind.

For those of you who don't know, the Spiral Jetty is arguably the greatest earth-art work of art since the establishment of the movement. The late Robert Smithson took gravel rocks and salt crystals and sculptted them into a 1500 ft. long spiral which comes out of the shore of the Great Salt Lake. A picture and description of it is in just about every art history textbook published after the 1970's. It seems that just about everybody in the art world knows about it but hardly anyone in Utah does. This is due to two factors: driving out to the jetty is a long and tedious journey through cattle pasturs and gravel roads that haven't been maintained in years. And the fact that the jetty has been subemeged under twenty feet of water for the last thirty years. It was just in 2000 that the jetty was able to be seen under water because off the drought, and 2004 that the Jetty was completely unsubmereged. It is unfortunetly subermging again because of the past abnormaly wet winter.

The Journey started out early in the morning. It was a three hour drive just to the Golden Spike where we had to take a dirt road from to get there. Once there, the road was okay. We passed some people on bikes and it seemed like the road was regularly traveled. After a few miles we took a right and followed a different road following the signs pointing which way to go. The roads kept getting worse and worse. We were going through fields where cows were lying in the road. Once we finnal got to the jetty and started walking around. We noticed that there was a silence that I have never heard. We were so far away from any form of civilization that there was nothing to hear. The Jetty was soewhat under water and I decided not to walk out on it because it seemed queit dangerous.

For those of you reading this, I apoligize that this might seem rather dull or esoteric. But it has been a form of psych-tgherapy for me because I've been having dreams about visiting the Jetty for a long time and now tha I have been I can put my mind to rest over this.