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.

Loe, who wrote her master's thesis on the jetty, says there is a move afoot to have a permanent Spiral Jetty exhibit as part of the Utah Museum of Art and History on Main Street in Salt Lake City. She says there could be auxiliary exhibits, rotating exhibits, along with it. Maybe some of Smithson's sculpture. Or earthworks of other artists. Or even something on the use of spirals in Native American art, which Smithson found so fascinating.

On the morning before they all left for the daylong trip to Spiral Jetty, Holt showed the journalists a film Smithson had made as he was building it. (In 1999, Smithson's estate gave the jetty itself to the Dia Art Foundation, a New York firm that manages several large earthworks. The land the jetty sits on is leased from the state.)

As the visitors from New York watched "Spiral Jetty" with Smithson's widow, they asked her about what they were seeing in the film, and also about the motivations behind her husband's art.

Both the Spiral Jetty and the Sun Tunnels bring life to a land previously thought of as wasteland, Holt said. "Many people in Utah don't go to look at the Salt Lake. The Spiral Jetty brings them there and they are amazed."

When questioned about the floods, Holt said that no one, including the Utahns who lived on its shores, knew the lake would rise so high. She said her husband chose the location for the jetty more by intuition than by science. He liked the black basalt rock and the red algae.

Thirty-five years ago, when he hired the backhoe to build the jetty, Smithson made sure the rocks were packed with dirt, to create a path about 15 feet wide. But the earth washed away in the high-water years, and now salt deposits coat some of the rocks. It doesn't look the way it did in 1970. "There is always the possibility in the future that more rocks will be added," Holt said.

You can check out the Spiral Jetty film at the Main Salt Lake library. And if you do see it, certain images will linger in your mind.

At one point, the film shows dust rising from the road leading to the jetty. ("That's the road we are going to be taking," Rothschild told the group.) At another point, the film shows dinosaur skeletons in red light, their bones a reference to the curving spine of the jetty and the red algae-laden water of the Great Salt Lake. "Nothing has ever changed since I have been here," says Smithson's voice, on the film.