For my 31st Birthday, I sat for a spell on the Spiral Jetty along a remote shore of the Great Salt Lake. The journey began in a desolate parking lot adjacent to The Golden Spike National Historic Site and wound 15 miles further over dirt ranch roads to Rozel Point. I made the pilgrimage with former Olympian, now Salt Lake City transplant Laura Sharp Wilson. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by a pair of aged hippies in a old blue VW bus with a red gas can strapped to its roof. Momentarily lost in space and time, as migrating pelicans swooped in graceful formations overhead, I gazed across white salt flats and the black basalt rocks Robert Smithson so deliberately rearranged on the lake bed in 1971. And yes, it was magic.
