Great Salt Lake & Antelope Island: Utah's Inland Sea

The Great Salt Lake is the largest salt lake in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth-largest terminal lake in the world — at 2.5 to 8 times the salinity of the ocean, it supports only brine shrimp and brine flies, which in turn support millions of migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. Antelope Island State Park, a 28,000-acre island connected to the mainland by a 7.2-mile causeway, has a free-roaming bison herd of 500 animals (one of the largest publicly accessible bison herds in the country), white sand beaches on the lake's south shore, and a 19th-century ranch that documents the island's early American history. The Great Salt Lake Desert west of the lake is the most desolate terrain accessible from a major American city.