With the windows down on the causeway, the smell begins to waft over. Its decaying brine shrimp and the attendant brine flies, washed up on the bleak-looking beaches.
Utah's Great Salt Lake is hardly a place where you expect to see much life; it's far too salty for that, yet what does live there is strangely profitable. Apparently the brine shrimp are used to make fish food, and it's a $250 million-a-year industry.
But it's fair to say that smelly, rotting shrimps are not what people drive over the causeway to Antelope Island to see. The 109-square-kilometre island is virtually treeless and has the barren look of high alpine tundra, yet it has become something of an unexpected natural haven.
Bighorn sheep, mule deer, pronghorn antelopes and bobcats also roam the relatively hassle-free hills, but it doesn't take too long to find the creatures that make Antelope Island special. On a hillside, an enormous, grumpy-looking male bison watches out over the road. The bulls tend to stick to themselves, or hang out in small bachelor groups. But it's the females, calves and non-breeding bulls that create the visual spectacle, roaming in gigantic herds across the exposed grasslands and grey sand beaches.
And, on the beach to the left, a 50-odd strong group ambles in largely disorganised loose formation. The ungainly calves gambol around their mothers' legs and moody teenagers kick up personal dust storms by rolling around in the sand. On their own, they're ponderous and comical. As a group, they're oddly majestic.
With the Wasatch mountains as a backdrop, it's a perfect picture of the true Wild West – the one without cowboy hats and gunfights.
The island came under state ownership in 1981, and is now a state park, but the bison are there because a local man called William Glassman became mesmerised by a small herd while visiting friends in Texas. He bought some with the intention of setting up a zoo on the south shore of the Great Salt Lake. But that didn't work out, so in 1893 he barged them over to John Dooly, who owned the ranch on Antelope Island on the condition that they were allowed to roam free.
Those four bulls, four cows and four calves formed the basis of the herd now on the island, which is so successful that an annual cull is needed to keep numbers manageable. The Antelope Island herd is evolving distinctions too – members have been found to have a genetic allele that is not found elsewhere.
In the 1890s, bison were so numerous across the US that people shot them out of railway carriages for fun. The roaming herds rivalled those of wildebeest in Africa. Antelope Island is now one of the few places where the clocks can be turned back to that era of abundance. And it seems the bison have a fairly firm idea about who's in charge now.
The bull on the hillside decides it is time to stop watching, and rises from his seated position. He then starts to lumber across the grass and parks himself in the middle of the road. Which, it seems, is a perfect place to stand still for a while and contemplate life.
Weighing a good few hundred kilos, he doesn't seem to be in any mood to defer to a car. So we wait, and wait, and wait, until the king of Antelope Island decides to move on …
The writer was a guest of the Utah Office of Tourism (visitutah.com).
