ANTELOPE ISLAND ATTRACTS VISITORS, HISTORIC INTEREST.

Byline: Lucinda Dillon Deseret News

The late writer Wallace Stegner loved this island tucked along the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake.

In his travels of Utah's wild places, Stegner saw stands of cottonwood trees protecting the lush setting near the old Fielding Garr ranch on the island's southern end and called the area ``the only oasis on the Great Salt Lake.''

The secret is no longer well kept. After all, Antelope Island has a page on the World Wide Web.

As it wraps up its third year as a tourist attraction, Antelope Island is experiencing unprecedented popularity from public, private and government interests.

This year brought record numbers of sightseers and scientists. Private enterprise is flourishing. Complaints about the stinky shores are giving way to an appreciation of the island's delicate wildlife and historic value.

Visitors to the island are up 40 percent, generating gate fees collected at the island's state park of $350,000 for the state in the year that ended June 30. An additional $140,000 went to Davis County, which collects $2 from the $6 charged to each car to drive the causeway that links the island to Syracuse, 25 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Salt Lake County wants in on the action with a plan for a causeway on the island's south end. State parks officials have approved a $50,000 grant to study environmental and fiscal impact of a southern causeway.

An eight-mile roadway, with two miles across the Great Salt Lake, would follow the historic trail pioneers took to the island's south shore, but the study is an introductory step and nothing more, said Mary Tullius, a parks spokeswoman.

``You can definitely feel things on the move out here,'' said Tim Smith, a ranger with the state's Division of Parks and Recreation.

But as caretaker of the island's ecosystem, Smith and his fellow wildlife officials are gingerly balancing wildlife preservation with better access and exposure for Utahans.

``That's the great challenge,'' he said.

Better services and events bring tourists in.

The Buffalo Point Restaurant - which specializes in buffalo burgers - is building a spacious new deck. A new tour boat, the ``Island Serenade,'' is at the tail end of a successful season. The division has hosted beach volleyball tournaments and moonlight bike rides.

In anticipation of this success, a 5,200-square-foot visitors center, perched atop Lady Finger Ridge, should be open in September.

Late in the morning on a recent August day, one of this year's coyote pups grins as he jogs through the gumweed and sunflowers just off a dirt road down the island's east side.

On this same morning, two pronghorns - known more popularly as antelopes - tiptoe through rocks and grasses. Farther down the road, some of the island's 700 bison roll in the dust and cluster in herds to the right and left.

The beach is dotted with avocets, Wilson's phalaropes and other migrating and nesting birds attracted to the island. They pose gracefully in the salty marshes, gorging on brine flies.

Smith wants more people to have this contact with wildlife. He wants visitors to see the mule deer, bobcats, jack rabbits and the tiny burrowing owl.

Since a causeway from Davis County was completed in 1993, business has increased steadily on the island. ``Antelope Island is filling a niche in the northern Utah tourism picture that hasn't been filled before with a large, unique natural area,'' Smith said.

Southern Utah is filled with wild and wide open places like this, Smith said, but northern Utah is not.

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Photo

Photo: A pronghorn, known as an antelope, co-exists with co yotes and buffalo on Antelope Island, on the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake.

Associated Press