Robert Smithson, earthworks artist, built Spiral Jetty in 1970. He died in a plane crash three years later, when he was only 35.

The 1,500-foot jetty became Smithson's signature work. Photos of it began to appear in art books. People wanted to see it, this long rock pier that stretches from the shore and circles in the water. Tourists, some from as far away as Europe, sought it out — driving their rental cars down a long, bumpy dirt road from the Golden Spike National Historic Site to Rozel Point, on the edge of the Great Salt Lake.

As the lake rose during the floods of the 1980s, Spiral Jetty was submerged under 20 feet of water. Sometimes you could see it from the air. At various times during the 1990s, it could be seen from the shore as well. With this past decade's drought, people who had never walked out to see it have had their chance.

This year, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, will present a retrospective of Smithson's work. The exhibition was organized by Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and has already been seen in Dallas. It opens at the Whitney on June 23 and runs through October 23, and includes Smithson's sculptures, photos, paintings, drawings and films. Of course, the exhibit will also include photos of Spiral Jetty.

To take advantage of the interest that will be generated in New York this spring, a group of East Coast journalists came to Utah last week to take a look at Spiral Jetty. Their trip was paid for by the Utah Office of Tourism, the Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau and Box Elder County.

Smithson's widow Nancy Holt was on hand as well. Holt also creates earthworks. (Utahns might be familiar with her Sun Tunnels, which, like Spiral Jetty, can be found in Box Elder County.)

Jan Rothschild from the Whitney was there, too, bringing along several curators. She came because she hadn't seen the jetty before. A local devotee of the jetty, Hikmet Loe, came along as well.

Margaret Godfrey, interagency program manager for the state's tourism office, traveled with the group and reports that they loved seeing the jetty. And not only the jetty, she said. They were happy about sagebrush and lizards and pelicans, too. "They were blown away by the nature and by the art." In the early evening, the journalists and the museum folks flew over the site in a helicopter and photographed the jetty from the air.

Godfrey believes all the attention from the East Coast may well result in more tourism in northern Utah — although an increase in visitors may be hard to document. There is no guest book for the jetty, but there is for the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site. If you can assume that many tourists would visit both sites once they're in the area, an increase in tourists to Golden Spike might indicate an increase in tourists to Spiral Jetty. The state's tourism office reports that the number of visitors to Golden Spike has averaged around 46,000 per year and never been more than 48,000 for the past six years.