Our water is more disgusting than yours-come to scenic Utah

[fernmanus]

Utah has some of the most epic snowkiting conditions in the US, yet it has some of the most slimy polluted water for summer kiteboarding.

Utah Lake - home to Geneva steel, moss, carp, and slimy brown water. Wear a nose plug because this filth (water) will congest your sinuses for days. Receives a nice thermal off the Great Salt Lake. Kite Beach - covered with old tires, broken glass, nails, old sofas. Local Kiters hauled off several truckloads of garbage this spring.

Rush Lake - natural saline water about 20% salt - really more of a pond than a lake with the average depth being less than knee high. Surrounded by cattle grazing (cow pies), barbed wire. The lake was home to carp a couple years ago, but a hot summer and drought led to a massive fish kill. The shoreline was covered with dead rotting fish and fish bones for a couple years. Now all we have to contend with is slimy stinky mud, cowpies, sage brush, sticky weeds, and moss. Every year the lake becomes unrideable due to complete moss coverage, we don't even think of flying foils there once the moss starts to grow. The water is so shallow and the mud is so deep that we call it mud boarding at Rush. Of course, this place is a haven for birds and flies. Making the lake so vile on a hot day that you pray that you don't get a mouthful of water after a poorly timed jump.

Salt Ponds - an isolated portion of the Great Salt Lake that receives a great thermal wind on hot summer days off the GSL. The only problem is that the salt content is well over 30%. The bottom of the ponds has a quarter inch crust of salt over slimy gooey mud. One shot of this water up your nose and your eyes will water for 10 minutes. Better than wasabi at making grown men cry.

Grantsville Reservior - Man made reservior that has a man-made dyke surrounding 2/3 of the reservior. Tiny in size, with a reach of less than 1/8 of a mile and the length of the whole lake is less than 1/2 mile. Home to Utah fishing hicks with sporty mullets and beer-can trailors. Shore is littered with broken bottles, rocks, fish hooks, beer cans. Reservior gets a gusty morning thermal wind. Bonus - you can jump angry, rod waving locales in small boats. Oh and the flies are so bad for a couple months that you cannot avoid getting swarms of them in your car just getting in and out of the car.

The nice thing about living in Utah is that every other place I travel to seems clean by comparison. Even Belmont Shores with trash all along the waterline seems like paradise compared to Utah's filthy locales.

If you have a more disgusting location, I would like to hear about it.

[Airgear.com]

What about Vernal?

[teklife]

::bump::

LOL, this one should have kept going, would love to hear about other people's horror spots.

where's Vernal?

[fernmanus]

That is why I wrote this piece. I was wondering how nasty it can get. I had a session late last summer. The salinity was so high that when I got a shot up my nose, my throat began to swell up and close. I had to get off the lake and get some fresh water. From now on, I am wearing nose plugs.

Vernal is a small town in Eastern Utah. I have no idea if there is any decent kiting out there.

[chemosavi]

Hey Fern, don know if yoos got affiliation with the local LDS posse but I hear they got swing where it counts. Why dontcha post a stickie down at the temple requestin clean waters from the heavens above? Use all the spirits above, below and in the past tense to make it happen kinda deal.

[fernmanus]

Hey Chemo,

I am LDS. It is interesting that you bring up that topic. I learned once that in Isaiah it talks about a time in the future when the water of the dead sea will be "healed" the fresh water will literally flow out of a temple into the dead sea - in other words, nice fresh clean water. Hey, maybe the Great Salt Lake will be "healed" at the same time.

However, we are getting off-topic, the idea is to talk about nasty water that people kite in, not about asking spirits to clean the water.

[iON!]

what about Pineview Reservoir? there's wind there eh?

[Tom183]

I remember a couple years ago during August we had a lot of rotting seaweed in a section of the shore break that doesn't circulate well (and we had very light wind so there was almost no swell) - smelled like week-old baby diapers mixed with vomit... Made me gag a couple times when I inhaled some in a wipe-out.

[Tom183]

P.S.: thanks for resurrecting that memory... :hurl:

[Kilokite]

Turd Avenue, SF Bay
It is right below SFO airport and got some of the nastiest water around(I don`t think it even qualify as water).The airport rather pay their montly fine rather then clean up their kerosene gup.
Cuts out there gets treated like gangrene and it is definetely one of the most popular spots in the bay for its steady winds.