The winter Olympics are underway in Italy — and the world is watching as the feats rack up. Host cities notoriously spend millions to get ready for their closeup before the Games come to town — but, Salt Lake City has a unique challenge ahead of it as it looks forward to hosting the 2034 Winter Games: Its namesake Great Salt Lake is drying up.
The lake sits at a fraction of where it used to be — after years of drought and climate change have decimated it. Today, it is about half the size it should be. And that’s left about 800 square miles of exposed lake bed there — creating a massive dust problem that Utahns are already experiencing.
So, local leaders want to take advantage of all of that Olympic momentum to try to save it. They’d be the first in the world to manage it, if they pull it off.
Leia Larsen is the water and land use reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune and a sixth generation Utahn. The Show spoke with her more about the lake, the Olympics — and just how hard it would be to turn it around in time for the Games.
Full conversation
LEIA LARSEN: I like to tell people the Great Salt Lake is kind of like a really big, big puddle. So it's pretty shallow. It's pretty shallow, very salty. Evaporates, loses a lot of water to evaporation every year. Just like a puddle.
LAUREN GILGER: Sure.
LARSEN: So, you know, it loses around 3 feet every year to evaporation. So we really need that pulse of snow melt every spring to help it refill. And up here in Utah, just kind of like down there where you guys are in Arizona and elsewhere in the West, we're having a really, really bad. So things are pretty dire up here.
GILGER: Right. So the lake really depends on snowpack from the mountains up there. And like we've seen everywhere, this is an incredibly dry winter. Not a lot of snow.
How bad? When you say it's really bad, how bad for this winter?
LARSEN: You know, it's. I just wrote a story. This is the worst snowpack we have on record. Some old timers say, you know, old time skiers say that 1977 was maybe a little worse, but it is bad. I've never seen anything like this.
Of course, just like Arizona, we're used to cycles of drought here, but this is, this is unprecedented. It's really kind of scary in terms ...
GILGER: ... of what it bodes for the future there.
LARSEN: Exactly. I was just talking to the National Weather Service a couple days ago and just asking for their projections, and we've got about two months left of winter and I asked, what are the odds that we get a bunch of snowstorms and we get right back to an average snowpack? What would it take? And they said we had about 10% chance, man. Yeah, it's pretty dire.
GILGER: So it does seem like there is some momentum right now to save the Great Salt Lake. And it's tied to an upcoming, although semi-distant Winter Olympics in 2034, right?
LARSEN: Yes. Feeling less and less distant, you know, eight years away. Yes. So there, there is this big push. I mean there has been a big push since 2021 when it hit that first record low that I mentioned. It's been a big topic of conversation.
But you know, people like to compare the Great Salt Lake maybe to, I guess a good counterpart would be Owens Lake out in California, where you know, the city of Los Angeles in like the 1920s went up there and kind of secretly bought up all the water rights. And then the tributary river that would flow to that lake, it was all diverted down to LA to field or growing city. And it dried that lake completely up.
Because like Owens Lake out there, the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake. Water only leaves for it through evaporation. And when no water flowing in, it just quickly dried up and became the largest source of human-caused dust pollution in the nation. And the Great Salt Lake is vastly bigger than that lake. And we're heading down that same trajectory.
And you know, Utah leaders, our elected officials and our policymakers here think we can be the first community in the entire world in history to reverse this trend of a sailing lake. Usually when they start down this path, they never come back. You can never bring them back from this brink. And our political leaders and officials seem to think that we can be the first to do that.
GILGER: What would this look like? How big of a shift would you need in water use investment? Where are you going to get the kind of water you would need to, to refill and restore the Great Salt Lake?
LARSEN: At this point, it's, it's a pretty daunting proposition, I have to be honest, because, you know, I used Owens Lake in California as an example. Well, you could point to, to a single water user, the city of Los Angeles, and they were entirely to blame here. Every single water user in this basin.
In the Great Salt Lake basin along the Wasatch Front, which is our most populated urban core, we all play a role in the lake's depletion. So it's, you know, it's a heavy lift task of every single water user to get it to like a minimum healthy elevation. It would need to rise by 6 feet, which may not sound like a lot, but again, it's a huge, huge, shallow puddle.
So this is a massive undertaking. In fact, I think an interesting point maybe for your listeners to make this more relatable is the last time the Great Salt Lake was at a minimum healthy elevation was 2002, which was the last time we hosted the Winter Olympics. So that's almost a quarter of a century ago.
GILGER: So this would be entirely in asking people to make cuts, not in augmenting the water in any way or not in other investment.
LARSEN: Yeah. So, I mean, of course it's going to take a lot of money. In our basin, just like the Colorado River, we have cities, but agriculture is by far the biggest water user. And most of that water is used to grow alfalfa, to make food that we like to eat in this basin. And we like to eat hamburgers, we like to eat cheese. And that's where most of that water is going.
So the big thing that the Legislature got behind to address things on the agricultural side was they overhauled our pioneer-era water law and made it possible for farmers to lease water to the Great Salt Lake.
And in doing so, you know, they could get some money from the state by letting their fields maybe, maybe they only get one cut of alfalfa right. In the spring or two cuts of alfalfa, and the rest of the year they stop irrigating and then sell that water to the state on a temporary basis and then the state uses that water to refill the lake. Like that was a brilliant idea and it does sound really great on paper. But in practice, it so far isn't really working.
So I know that's a big focus of lawmakers. Our legislative session is full swing currently and there is a lot of effort, including this afternoon there's going to be a hearing on a bill to kind of tweak that leasing law and see if we can get more people to participate. But I think that's really what people are banking on.
GILGER: Interesting. What do you make of this effort to kind of seize on the 2034 Olympic Games as, as a way to motivate people to do this? Is this, you know, not greenwashing, but sports washing?
LARSEN: I mean, you can see why they're going to do it, right. Because the whole world, in 2034, it's going to be flying in to Salt Lake City. And the first thing you see as you fly into the Salt Lake Valley is this lake, or lack thereof. I mean, are people going to fly in and going to see a healthy, thriving lake, or are they going to see 800 miles of exposed lake bed that's turning into a dust nightmare?
So you can see why they focused on that target. But it would take such a heavy, heavy lift. I mean, some people run the numbers, and I think it's like, like we'd have to come up with 1 million spare acre feet of water every single year to get it to that point in, in a decade. And we have less than a decade.
And that's just like such a huge ask. It's hard to wrap your head around how much water 1 million acre feet is. It's huge. But Gov. Cox, our governor here, Gov. Spencer Cox, he had a big announcement in late September where he called the media to the shores of the Great Salt Lake and unveiled this new initiative where our business community, or some of our wealthiest business owners and leaders in the state have donated $100 million to this effort, as well as the nonprofit Ducks Unlimited, they have donated another $100 million.
So ton of money. But the big problem here, of course, is all the money in the world does not equal water. And you've got to get people willing to take money in exchange for water. And again, that's just been really, really hard. Farmers here, they like their agricultural way of life. They don't really want to give it up. They're a little cautious to participate.
GILGER: So what do you think the odds are, Leia, at this very moment, at least, that this will be successful, that the lake will look, you know, like it used to in eight years?
LARSEN: I want to be optimistic about it. I think we all do. But, you know, I'll be realistic about it. Again, it's a heavy lift. I think, though, what some people would say who follow the Great Salt Lake closely and care about it is that maybe we don't get it up 6 feet in time for 2034, but even if we got it up 3 feet, that's an improvement, right? That's an improvement.
That's some of the exposed lake bed that's going to get covered and be less of a dust issue. We'll see. I wish I had a stronger, like, more definitive answer for you, but we're all closely watching, and time will tell, I suppose.
GILGER: Time will tell.
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