with four hours free before we returned from utah yesterday, we drove out to antelope island state park, less than 1 hour from downtown salt lake city.  you cross a seven-mile-long causeway over the great salt lake out onto the island, which is just hair-raisingly beautiful–windswept, scrubby, full of sky overhead, offering panoramas of the great salt lake, and encounters with bison and antelope all the way along the ring road. i loved it.

as i walked out onto the dry flats to gather some salty sand for STILL blog, i found the very sun-bleached remains of a coyote. with the theme song from the good, the bad, and the ugly playing in my head, I looked up expecting to see circling vultures, and, instead, watched a flock of american avocets flap past me to land in the shallows, where they resumed feeding.

magical.

jaw bones of a coyote skeleton

great salt lake, antelope island, utah