The Great Salt Lake is in Northern Utah, about 30 minutes north of Salt Lake City. Around 32,000 years ago, this lake was much bigger and covered around 20,000 square miles and reached depths of 1,000 feet. Today we call this bigger, prehistoric lake, Lake Bonneville.

Over thousands of years, floods and drought significantly shrank Lake Bonneville into what we now know as The Great Salt Lake, this shrinking also created The Bonneville Salt Flats. The Great Salt Lake as we know it today was established around 11,000 years ago.

The Great Salt Lake has 3 tributary rivers, The Weber River, The Bear River, and The Jordan River. The Great Salt Lake has no outlet for water. The only way the lake can lose water is through evaporation, which is why it has such a high salt content as those minerals remain through evaporation.