Spiral Jetty is far-out artwork

Editor's Note: Lee Benson's office has been his bicycle the past week as he traveled the byways and backways of northern Utah looking for columns. This is the final column from his journey.

GREAT SALT LAKE — Imagine the least likely place to find a world-renowned work of art.

Now imagine taking a wrong turn getting there.

Welcome to the Spiral Jetty.

The jetty can be found out here just off Rozel Point on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, 100 miles from the Wasatch Front and about a million miles from the nearest Manhattan art gallery, existentially speaking.

Technically the jetty is in the lake, although "in" right now shouldn't be taken literally because the lake is in one of its shrinking phases. The jetty currently sits like a marooned sailor in a baked mud seabed a good football field from any actual salt water.

I know this because I personally laid eyes on the Spiral Jetty to end my bike tour across northern Utah. Finishing lines aren't supposed to be easy to get to and this was no exception. First you have to make it to the Golden Spike National Historic Site, which is itself the last stop on a dead-end road. (Strange but true. The point that in 1869 completed the transcontinental railroad and connected the country is now the end of the line.)

After the pavement ends at the visitors center, it's 16 miles of rough dirt road to the forgotten edge of a forgotten lake.

The remoteness, of course, was what drove Robert Smithson to Rozel Point in the first place. That and the red water.

In 1970, Smithson was an up-and-coming superstar artist from New York who wanted to do something so big and so out there that it couldn't possibly be hung on an art salon wall.

He seized on the upper arm of the Great Salt Lake because the algae, brine shrimp and bacteria in the salty water often conspire to color the lake blood red. A lover of spirals — curlicues to the layman — Smithson bulldozed thousands of the black basalt rocks that litter the shoreline along Rozel Point and organized them at the edge of the water in a counter-clockwise spiral 3 feet wide, 15 feet deep and 1,500 feet long.

Critics immediately proclaimed it "one of the most famous artistic earthworks in the world." Art aficionados around the world beat a path to the lake shore.

At least they did until the Spiral Jetty disappeared. For nearly a quarter of a century, from 1971 through about 1996, the lake level rose so high that it completely submerged the jetty, rendering it a real hidden gem.

But then the lake went back down and the jetty re-emerged, beckoning a whole new generation of earthwork art pilgrims.