Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

Traci and I have lived our entire lives in Utah and have never visited Antelope Island. Today felt like as good a day as any to change that.

The only thing we really knew about the state park is that it's where the buffalo roam (and of course where the deer and antelope play). Our first stop was the visitors center where we also learned that you shouldn't bother the bison. If you do, especially while they're eating, they're likely to charge at you at up to 40 miles per hour.

We hadn't been out of the visitor center for more than a minute when we saw our first bison. He was in the grass eating. A guy with a camera decided he needed a closer look and kept walking ever closer until he was only about 20 feet away. The bison didn't take too kindly to the intrusion and started to charge.

That was enough to put the photographer into a full sprint back to his car. The bison returned to his lunch.

We ate our lunch at picnic bench overlooking the Great Salt Lake. We then braved the brine shrimp (and the accompanying smell, which luckily was much less pungent than on the Saltair side of the lake) and ventured out to the water. We weren't dressed to get into the lake (and I'm not sure if I would have wanted to anyway; swimming in the Great Salt Lake is another Utah thing I've never done, but that can wait for another day) but the boys had fun chucking rocks into it.

After the lake, we headed to the other side of the island, where we were excited to see dozens of bisons. 

And then hundreds.

Pretty cool that you can be just miles away from the city and feel like you're in a completely different world.

Along the way, we passed the park restaurant that featured bison burgers. It seemed odd to eat the animal you'd come to the park to admire, but what do I know about nature?