Escaping Addiction at the End of Antelope Island

It’s my final leg after a week in Utah, and I’m taking the long way from Moab to Vegas via Salt Lake City, visiting my favorite state park in the country.

Antelope Island will be a national park one day, I’m convinced. It certainly has the allure. It’s just so epic, floating in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, surrounded by blue waters and yellow fields and brown buffalo. How is the St. Louis Arch designated a national park in the same vein as Yosemite, but Antelope Island is not?

I first visited Antelope Island seven years ago, camping out in my rental car on a snowy March visit. I arrived after nightfall and couldn’t even see the glory of the place until sticking my head out the moonroof like a periscope the next morning. What I saw forever endeared me to this paradise — rolling hills of snow surrounding the lake, dotted by herds of buffalo, my spirit animal, roaming freely across the island.

Talk about a contented sigh.

Today’s drive from Moab starts early-early at 5am, and it will take me the better part of the day to return to Nevada that evening for a final campout at Great Basin National Park and my flight home the next day. I’m learning to love the long way, though. Life is too short to take the short way.

I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts on this road trip without social media, and the one today is talking about startup companies. My new nonprofit ministry, a startup of sorts, has been heavily on my mind throughout this trip: getting funding, keeping funding, ideally growing our funding beyond the bare minimum.

“Most startups fail,” the man on the podcast bluntly says. “Let’s assume yours does, too. Is it still a good use of your time?”

The question lingers in the air as the dark turns to light, as I leave the barrenness of eastern Utah for the civilization of Salt Lake City, and back into wilderness again at Antelope.

I arrive at the park entrance, delighted to pay the state park fee in contrast to my national parks pass. I roll down the windows and breathe the fresh salt air, a vast change from the orange dust clogging my nostrils across southern and eastern Utah. I drive down a long narrow inlet as a man on a bicycle soars past me the opposite direction. I exhale with a smile.

Why do the yellows and misty blues of this place stir so strongly with me? As much as I want this place to become a national park, I kinda like knowing the secret of it. It makes me wonder what other glorious state parks out there I’ve not yet visited because I’ve been so fixated on the national parks like Pokémon — gotta catch ‘em all. What other comparable, if not greater wonders like Antelope Island am I missing?

Before making even one turn past the visitor center, I spot my first buffalo grazing on a hillside, welcoming me like a T-rex into Jurassic Park. I drive a dozen miles to the southern tip of the island, transitioning to a long gravel road for the final stretch, past multiple herds of buffalo, dozens of them, including adorable calves toddling with their mothers. These creatures are so mammoth, so masculine and solitary, yet also feminine, caring and communal, a fusing of two polarities. I strive for both in my own life. To be bold and meek, stately and embracing, outwardly strong and inwardly calm. Inviting.

Some buffalo trot across the gravel road as I halt my vehicle, the perfect shot I’d prayed to get. I roll down my window and step out at a safe distance to catch them. Like Pokémon.

Sitting on a bench in the park, I ponder the concept that I would absolutely return to Antelope if I knew I only had a month to live. It’s one of my special places. I’d want my eyes to absorb the glory of this place once more on this side of Paradise. I ponder what other places I would go.

Where else would I go? Where would you?

I filmed a video at the end of Antelope Island, processing my lack of social media and screen time and addictive behaviors on this break away from running a ministry. And that soon I will return home, both a sad reality and a necessary one.

If you’re curious what I spoke about at the end of an island at the end of a road trip at the end of a social media disconnection, well – here you go: