great salt lake

I flew back from a wedding in Oregon yesterday, and we flew over Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake. It is perhaps the strangest natural landscape I have ever seen. The lake is two distinct colors because of a railway line running across it changing the algae composition. The northern half is a deep red and the bottom half is a crystalline blue. The water is clear enough to see the topography underneath. From the air, it looks like a prehistoric land or the results of a post-apocolyptical desoltion. Even the land surrounding the lake is surreal in its starkness. It looks like a giant hand carefully placed each strata of sand.