Last Saturday, we found ourselves on the shores of the Great Salt Lake — or, more precisely, we were in the *middle* of the Great Salt Lake, on the sprawling patch of land known as Antelope Island.
Antelope Island is home to a Mormon homestead, an historical farm, and a bison reserve. But for yours truly, Antelope Island is and always will be about just one thing:
That's not, by the way, "spiders" as in "Aw, look at the little spiders!" but "spiders" as in "Oh, my God, we're right smack in the middle of a Zombie Spider Invasion!"
From the moment we got out of our vehicle at the Antelope Island Visitor Center, we were right smack in the middle of a B-grade horror movie. Spiders. Were. Everywhere.
Everywhere we looked, dozens of spiders dangled from communal webs. We're talking colonies of spiders — herds! of! spiders! — packed into every available webspace: hanging off road signs, draped between bushes, slathered over the windows of buildings.
And these, my friends, were not wee little spiders, but big, meaty, throbbing, slobbering spiders, with long, cruel, curling legs and glassy black soulless eyes and abdomens the size of toy footballs. They could catch sparrows in their webs. They could carry off a kitten.
(Okay, okay: in retrospect, the spiders were probably no bigger, including their legs, than about six inches in diameter, and their abdomens were, maybe, the size of those square rubber erasers you used back in elementary school. But my goal here isn't to shoot a Discovery Channel documentary … it's to make you feel the way I felt when walking around in the middle of all this. And I gotta tell ya: I felt surrounded.)
I am, as you may have guessed, mildly arachnophobic, so Antelope Island was not exactly the best choice for a morning hike. In fact, after seeing the sheer number and size of spiders on the island, I kept to parking lots and paved roads (and still managed to get at least a dozen strands of thick, sticky webbing slung across my face).
One trail we found led off into what looked like friendly, open desert grassland. At first, looking into the sunrise, I thought, "Oh, it's beautiful! Look — there's morning mist rising from the desert earth, drifting between the scrubby bushes and stunted trees!" And then, on closer inspection, the truth became clear: there was no mist. As far as the eye could see, every single bush and tree was draped in spider webs, and hundreds — nay, millions! — of spiders per square foot were dangling between each one.
A new nightmare scenario, then: me, lost in the desert … parched … water glimpsed ahead … an easy walk to the pond between me and the grassland … only to discover — the walk is through a densely packed spider colony!
They call the place Antelope Island. We never saw any Antelopes. Heck, there's a bison preserve there, and we saw only one bison — a tiny brown dot in the distance, virtually invisible.
Which leaves me with only one question: why isn't this place called Spider Island?
It wouldn't attract quite so many tourists, I guess.
I know! I had a panic attack the other day because of how many spiders there were! My boyfriend and I hiked up to watch the sunset… We didn't even notice the millions of spiders until it was too late, and the sun hit the webs just right. Walking back through the path towards my car was literally the hardest thing I've EVER had to physically make myself do.