Environment: Preserving the Great Salt Lake

Utah struggles to tame a body of water turned outlaw

For three miles beyond what was once the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, cottonwood and birch trees stand in 9 ft. of brackish water, their trunks burned and their branches leafless. Dead wood and decaying, bloated carp litter the shore. Roads are flooded out, towers for power lines sit in muddy pools, and farther south, the famed Saltair resort with its Moorish-style gold domes is shut down.

Roiled since 1982 by prodigious storms, the 30-mile-wide Great Salt Lake has risen 10...