Snowville • The July sun beats down on dust and sagebrush in rural Box Elder County.

Up the road from where the proposed Stratos Data Center would go, steers bellow and calves stick close to their moms.

Journalists from The Salt Lake Tribune have toured this area twice in the past two months.

There was still some water in springs lining the road in June, and cattle were out grazing in more than one spot along the road. Birds flitted around the springs near the old shoreline.

By July, it was baking at more than 100 degrees, and the land above the north arm of the Great Salt Lake looked like a desert wasteland during a tour around the land slated for the contentious data center.

Here’s a look at what we saw:

Salt Wells Flat

From a hill crest in the Promontory Mountains, there was once a view of the Great Salt Lake.

What used to be shore is now a sandy lake bed as far as the eye can see. And the Salt Wells Flat doesn’t have the water it had just a month before.

The spot isn’t far southeast, as the crow flies, from where Wonder Valley Utah is planned.

It’s where cattle graze in the winter, and there’s evidence of that (stinky evidence in June, though it’s dried out by July) near large stock tanks that dot the road.

Those cattle don’t need a lot of water to drink, Rhonda Lauritzen said, and definitely not as much as a data center uses.

“We’re talking about massive water use that’s not being used now,” said Lauritzen, who’s part of the fight against the data center through Box Elder Accountability Referendum, or BEAR.

While Kevin O’Leary, the celebrity investor who is pushing for the data center, has said he plans to pipe water back to the Great Salt Lake, it’s still unclear how that would happen as there are no public plans for the project.

Monument Point and “Lone Rock”

Lauritzen and her family have seen that play out in real time.

At Monument Point, a historic railroad spot, she and her brother Val Anderson stand with a picture of their father from the 1990s. In the photo, he’s standing in water that reaches halfway up to his shin. Lauritzen recalls floating in the water nearby.

Today, the water’s edge of the Great Salt Lake is nearly out of sight from this location.

Lauritzen and her husband tried to measure the distance to the water by drone last year and turned it around right at the waterline about four miles away when they got an alert that the drone’s battery was going to die.

The lake is 15 feet lower than it would be naturally, said Ben Abbott, executive director of Grow the Flow.

“We’re in a total state of emergency,” he said, and the conditions on a scorching summer day were the perfect example of what a heat island from the data center – something one physics professor predicted – would feel like.

Anderson family land

Lauritzen’s family has known the lake is in crisis for a while.

The land they own for their business, Mineral Resources International, used to be beachfront.

Now they source brines – highly concentrated solutions of salt in water – from elsewhere because a canal they dug using an easement with the state no longer reaches the water.

“We dug a little further and further until we just couldn’t reach it anymore. And that was a decade ago,” she said.

Even in good water years, she said, the trend has been down.

Locomotive Springs

A few miles down the road, Locomotive Springs is a prime example of that trend.

Phragmites line the shore of Bar M Spring, one of the main springs at the waterfowl management area fed by underground aquifers.

In June, meadowlarks were singing, birds were swimming in the water and all colors of dragonflies flitted around. Some dragonflies remained on the hot July afternoon, and the minnows still swarmed rocks around the edges of the spring.

Hansel Valley

There’s a spot of water at Bar H Ranch, too — some springs and the Hansel Valley Wash sit on the western portion of about 10,000 acres where the data center would go.

Waterfowl float through the channel in June as cattle graze on the ranch.

By July, most of the cattle are gone, and sagebrush stretches as far as the eye can see until rolling hills on both sides of the road.

Lauritzen describes it as the “mythical American West” and said she doesn’t want to see it transformed from something so special into something else.

“It’s not all about more jobs and more money,” she said. “We want a place where we want to live.”