In 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox appointed Brian Steed to serve as the state commissioner to help protect and preserve the Great Salt Lake.
Summit Land Conservancy CEO Cheryl Fox said they tapped Steed to serve as keynote speaker at the annual breakfast May 14.
“He brings a lot of experience in land management, public lands management, to the role,” Fox said. “And he has said famously that there are terminal lakes. Salt Lake is a terminal lake; it doesn't have an outlet. There are terminal lakes all across the world that have dried up, and in other places, they've tried to save them, and they have not been successful. So, Brian's call to action has really been, ‘Let's be the people who actually save the lake.’”
The conservancy has worked to fund the For the Future campaign. By protecting open lands, Fox said they’re protecting the watershed for the Great Salt Lake.
“For 150 years, people thought that every drop of freshwater ought to be used before it reached the lake, where then it could not be used anymore,” she said. “So, all of the laws and all of the practices are really built around diverting the water out of the lake. As important as it is to save the Great Salt Lake, we don't live in a country where we just take people's stuff. So, figuring out how we're going to work with the people who own the water to save the Great Salt Lake is an interesting and far-sighted project, and the Summit Land Conservancy is very involved in that.”
Fox says the conservation breakfast usually sells out. Tickets to the May 14 breakfast at Deer Valley are $15 and available online. You can find the link here.
The organization has other events coming up like a volunteer cleanup day at Marchant Meadows Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. The Summit Land Conservancy purchased the property in 2020 along the Weber River in Peoa and is still working to pay off the bridge loan that has been extended four times.
Then the annual Moonshine Adventure is Wednesday, April 9.
Skiers meet at the base of Park City Mountain to skin up and ski down under the light of a full moon. There will be a tailgate party afterward.
