Something in the water

When he heard that the Spiral Jetty, an incredible, sunken work of art in Utah's great lake, had resurfaced after 30 years, John Dickie set off to find it. Any man worth his salt would have done the same

We were way out in the sage-brush prairie of Utah's desolate north-western corner, seven or eight miles from the nearest blacktop road. There had not been a trace of another car for 24 hours. Then a corkscrew dust trail appeared on the horizon. As it sped through the afternoon heat haze, the cloud became a white pick-up. There could now be no mistake: it was heading straight towards us. It slowed and came to a halt beside our parked 4x4. The driver lowered his window: "Howdy." Like his two passengers, he was struggling without success to suppress a smirk. He paused before delivering the punch line for his buddies. "You those English guys bin hot footin' it down the Spiral Jetty?" We had come on a pilgrimage across thousands of miles to see Robert Smithson's long-lost Land Art masterpiece. It was clearly the funniest thing these three Mormon cowboys had heard in weeks.

They had read about us on the front page of the local paper. Two days earlier, by another freakish coincidence, reporters from Utah's Deseret News had spotted us as we visited the isolated Spiral Jetty site. The newsmen were following up rumours from local pilots that the Jetty, lost for some three decades, had resurfaced.

It was created in the spring of 1970. Smithson (who was from New Jersey) brought puzzled contractors to Rozel Point on the northern shore of Great Salt Lake. He asked them to back a truck into the water, dumping 7,000 tons of basalt rocks as they went. The result was an elegant scroll 1,500ft long. The gesture was deceptively simple: Robert Hughes has referred to the Spiral Jetty's "traffic jam of symbolic references". It also condensed Smithson's rage at New York art establishment "robots", his fascination with place and displacement, and his guiding obsession with entropy in all things. The work's importance, and its influence, were immediate. Smithson was in at the foundation of a genre – Land Art – that tore free of the gallery economy to say something new and powerful about the enduring Art and Nature questions.

Yet hardly anyone had actually seen the Spiral Jetty when, two years after it was made, a change in the Great Salt Lake's capricious plumbing caused the piece to be swallowed up by brine and mud. Smithson died soon afterwards when his small plane crashed on a visit to another site. The tragedy was compounded by the loss of his magnum opus. One of the great American artworks of the 20th century seemed destined to leave only photographic traces, to become a tired staple of anthologies.

The Spiral Jetty has some stiff competition to be the most inaccessible Land Art site in the United States. We later visited Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, which is 15 miles from the nearest half-decent road. Reaching Michael Heizer's Double Negative required us to unload our 4x4 in 50F heat. It was the only way to get past the pile of Nevada desert that had drifted across the path. We could still hear the three cowboys snorting as we fried. Travel in that environment is not to be undertaken lightly. Spare fuel and copious supplies of water are essential. Emergency flares are advised.

The Jetty is an hour and a half from Salt Lake City. Fifteen miles up the dirt road is the Golden Spike National Historic Site that marks the joining point of the first railroad to cross the US from east to west. The museum will please connoisseurs of kitsch. Neither the rail track nor the two engines that endlessly re-enact the moment of union are original. The great meeting itself was a very American mix of grandeur and tacky theatre. Fearsome competition to grab subsidies meant that the two railway companies whose workers joined hands on that day in 1869 actually "missed" each other the first time around. They had been running parallel in opposite directions for tens of miles before a political deal was brokered on where they should join.

Nevertheless, the Golden Spike is where the journey to the Spiral Jetty really begins. It is essential to arm yourself with the detailed directions that are available from the visitor centre. (They can also be found on the internet.)

Just as importantly, it is at the Golden Spike that you seem to leave Utah and enter the mythology of contemporary art. For fruitless quests to find the Jetty have become almost as fabled as the work itself. Artist Tacita Dean made an audio piece about her efforts to get there; in it she and a companion argue over how to interpret the directions. Only last month in Artforum a critic and a photographer published a shaggy-dog story about a forlorn drive last summer from New York to Rozel Point.

Smithson's own descriptions of the approach to the place where he set the Spiral Jetty are evocative but hardly precise. "Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception." He had probably been listening to too much Jefferson Airplane to be of use to the art tourist.

These precedents kept our expectations of finding the Jetty in check, despite the isolated optimistic rumours that had reached our ears since we landed at Salt Lake City airport. Suspense set in as soon as we pulled out of the car park of the Golden Spike visitor centre. There is little out there to navigate by: the dry crags of Promontory Point, the rocky track, the lake, the sky. So the instructions transform every fence post, every slight bend in the road, into a clue. Cattle grids became beacons of hope. We crossed them reverently with our fists clenched in growing anticipation, and then stopped to take grateful photographs. The three cowboys would have been helpless.

The excitement reached a new intensity when we came to the rusty Dodge truck and the abandoned Second World War amphibious vehicle. They were left here when oil prospectors, who had made desultory efforts to get rich on the lake's resources since the 1920s, finally gave in. Not that these sorry industrial remnants are merely incidental. Items like these were one of the key reasons why Smithson liked the place. He called it "a world of modern prehistory" and evoked it in mock-portentous terms: "The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes."

We were now only a couple of hundred yards from our goal. Yet this is where Tacita Dean and the Artforum critic, like the oil prospectors, forsook their quest. For here there is another rock jetty. It is not an artwork, but a rickety straight projection into the lake – the prospectors' work again, using the same method as Smithson. Most of it was, it seems, built in unconscious imitation after the Spiral Jetty had sunk. Our advice to future visitors is simple. Do not be fooled, as others have been. Keep on the path.

A short way ahead the rocks in the road became too threatening to the underside of our car for us to go any further except on foot. We marched on until, over a slight ridge, the Spiral Jetty itself came into view. It was a bizarre and beautiful sight. Smithson's writings all refer to the odd colour of the water here, but the photos make it look as if there were a large amount of artistic licence in his descriptions. There was not. The water is pink. The Spiral Jetty, made from the black rocks that litter the shore, has now turned completely white because of the layers of salt crystals that coat it. I, for one, had expected to see something monumental, grey and worthy. What we found looked like an item from a colossal sweet trolley.

The colour of the water is natural in a sense. It is due to algae – the only thing that can survive in this super-saline portion of the lake. However, human intervention in the environment has played its part too. A railway causeway long ago sealed off the northern portion of the lake, leading to increased salt density. We took a short flight over the site later the same day. From above, the landscape around seems like a giant chemistry set, the water alternating mysteriously from pink to pastel green. The Jetty looks stunning in this setting. You could almost be cruising over the surface of Mars. It is all very Smithsonian. He was very dismissive of the pretty-pretty aesthetics of traditional landscape – and tourism. "Beauty spots, they call them. Nature with class." His imagination was fired instead by a decaying industrial town or the site of a planned airport.

The shallows where the Spiral Jetty begins are a slush of white crystals. The water is viscous with dissolved salt. Broken lines of sparkling rocks protrude from the surface at the Jetty's edges, but most of it looms between six inches and two feet under. Directly across the lake is one of the many military firing ranges in the area. We caught sight of a jet, an explosion cloud; several seconds later the gentle boom reached our ears. It was time to step on to the Jetty. Actually, the walk feels riskier than it probably is. We had heard dire, unsubstantiated warnings about what happens if you ingest the water. It clogs the engines of boats in minutes. The ever quotable Smithson came to mind and fuelled the nerves: "One seizes the spiral, and the spiral becomes a seizure." The gleam on the water makes it difficult to tell where the Jetty's rim lies. The footing alters unpredictably from solid rock to crystal mush. Nevertheless, the sights, the experience of stepping the whole length of the work, give your responses the time and space to precipitate out. Salt is clearly important to the Spiral Jetty. It is a mine of metaphors for what art might be able to do: it preserves and kills; its crystals inhabit and cling to life's contours, grow in spiralling non-organic forms, and dissolve into nothing. Land Art has sometimes been criticised for being macho: boys with diggers and dynamite making their angry mark on Mother Earth. If a visit to the Spiral Jetty proves one thing, it is that this complaint is hopelessly off-target. The Jetty is not an alien imposition on the landscape. In the immensity of those surroundings it feels delicate and playful. For Smithson, his creation was just tough enough to engage in an intimate dialogue with its surroundings as they changed. For the traveller prepared to run the gauntlet of cowboy mirth, visiting the Spiral Jetty is a way to do something in a landscape that is more exciting and memorable, indeed more of a holiday, than just exercise or gawping at a view. The journey – and I think this was Smithson's intention – becomes part of the artwork.

The Facts

Getting there

American Airlines offers a weekend departure fare to Salt Lake City from Gatwick via St Louis for £497.20 (0845- 778 9789; www.aa.com); BA's lowest fare is £627 via Phoenix, in conjunction with American West Airlines (0845-773 3377; www.britishairways.com); Trailfinders offers a flight on Northwest Airlines via Minneapolis for £395.80 (020-7937 5400; www.trailfinders.com). 4x4 vehicles can be hired through several international companies: Avis (0870-606 0100; www.avisworld.com) from £299 a week including full insurance, tax, unlimited mileage. Hertz (0870-599 6699; www.hertz.co.uk) from £313 a week all inclusive, some offers available. Alamo (0870 400 4580; www.goalamo.com) from £279 a week all inclusive, some offers on website.

Being there

Flights over the Spiral Jetty in a helicopter or small plane can be arranged through Great Western Aviation, based 40 miles to the north of Salt Lake City in Ogden (3911 Airport Road, Ogden, UT 84405; 801-394-3400; www.gwaviation.com). A twin-engined plane big enough to hold five passengers costs $355 (£240) per hour. The price is calculated in 10-minute units. A flight including several passes over the Spiral Jetty takes around 45 minutes.

Further information The jetty is owned by the DIA Center for the Arts: 542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. Tel (212) 989-5566; www.diacenter.org/ltproj/spiraljetty. The National Parkwebsite has directions and map: www.nps.gov/gosp/tour/jetty.html