John Fremont's overly glowing reports of the area were published shortly after his expedition. That happened in 1850 under the leadership of Howard Stansbury (Stansbury discovered and named the Stansbury mountain range and Stansbury island). Fremont led the first scientific expedition to the lake, but with winter coming on, he did not take the time to survey the entire lake. In time, "Timpanogos" was dropped from the maps and its original association with Utah Lake was forgotten. On some maps, the two names were used synonymously. As people came to know of the Great Salt Lake, they interpreted the maps to think that "Timpanogos" referred to the Great Salt Lake. Other cartographers followed his lead and charted Lake Timpanogos as the largest (or larger) lake in the region. It was the larger of the two lakes that appeared on Miera's map. Escalante had been on the shores of Utah Lake, which he named Laguna Timpanogos. As oral reports of their findings made their way to those who did make records, some errors were made. Most of the trappers, however, were illiterate and did not record their discoveries. The most obvious example is a map by Nicolas Sanson dated 1650. However, there are several maps dating all the way back to 1575 that show the Great Salt Lake at the correct latitude and longitude, within an accuracy of only a few degrees. Shortly thereafter, other trappers saw it and walked around it. In 1824, it was observed, apparently independently, by Jim Bridger and Etienne Provost. No European name was given to it at the time, and it was not shown on the map by Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, the cartographer for the expedition. The Great Salt Lake entered written European history through the records of Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, who learned of its existence from the Timpanogos Utes in 1776. One of the local Shoshone tribes, the Western Goshute tribe, referred to the lake as Pi'a-pa, meaning "big water", or Ti'tsa-pa, meaning "bad water". At the time of Salt Lake City's founding, the valley was within the territory of the Northwestern Shoshone however, occupation was seasonal, near streams emptying from canyons into the Salt Lake Valley. The Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute have lived near the Great Salt Lake for thousands of years. Stansbury's 1852 map of the Great Salt Lake and adjacent country in the Utah Territory It has been called "America's Dead Sea" and provides a habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl, including the largest staging population of Wilson's phalarope in the world. This density causes swimming in the lake to feel similar to floating. Since the lake has no outlet besides evaporation, these minerals accumulate and give the lake high salinity (far saltier than seawater) and density. Its three major tributaries, the Jordan, Weber, and Bear rivers together deposit around 1.1 million tons of minerals in the lake per year. In 2021, after years of sustained drought and increased water diversion upstream of the lake, it fell to its lowest recorded area at 950 square miles (2,460 km²), falling below the previous low set in 1963. In the 1980s, it reached a historic high of 3,300 square miles (8,500 km 2), and the West Desert Pumping Project was established to mitigate flooding by pumping water from the lake into the nearby desert. The area of the lake can fluctuate substantially due to its low average depth of 16 feet (4.9 m). It is a remnant of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that covered much of western Utah. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particularly through lake-effect snow. The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world.
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