Photographer’s report: What I saw at the Hansel Valley data center site

Editor’s note: Utah News Dispatch asked photojournalist Spenser Heaps to document the much debated Hansel Valley in Box Elder County, where a fast-tracked proposal for a large-scale data center has spurred outrage across Utah and beyond. This is a collection of his impressions and photos.

Hansel Valley flows down gently sloping terrain to the south, a checkerboard of emerald green farmland giving way to the deeper sage green and brown of pasture before finally spilling into the chalk white shores of the Great Salt Lake. 

A few solitary ranches populate the landscape, with homes and barns and trees clustered together like medieval castles surrounded by the open plain. A few dozen cattle wander over and stare at us and our dogs through the wire fence.

An older man in a side-by-side, his own scruffy dog in the back, pulls up as we stand on the side of the gravel road. 

“You look lost,” he says. We’re not, I assure with a smile, and explain why we’re there. I get an earful about the proposed data center, the rancher disavows being a part of any deal. But he doesn’t want to talk to any journalists. He suggests an area to camp farther to the southwest and wishes us well.

We drive south, hugging the western boundary of the proposed Stratos Project, a “hyperscale” data center originally planned for 40,000 acres of land. A fence post is painted neon orange where the boundary of the project makes a 90-degree turn east, a bit of orange over-spray caught in the leaves of the sagebrush behind it. 

We set camp below a stone outcrop at Monument Point. When the transcontinental railroad passed by in 1869, water lapped at the bottom of these rocks, according to a sepia-toned photograph I found online. Now, the dry lakebed stretches far into the distance until it meets the hypersaline waters of the northern arm of the Great Salt Lake, dyed pink by salt-loving microorganisms. Clouds cast pink by the sunset reflect in the water, an ethereal scene.

In the morning I wake before dawn and drive to a spot on the western edge of the valley to catch the sunrise. Rabbits dart out of the way of my truck. Shorebirds sweep through the cool, still air. Half a dozen willet alight in the grass and perform a shrill chorus. The sun hits the valley floor and fields of grass explode into an orange glow — the silence of the valley belying the high-stakes conflict unfolding in council chambers and courtrooms about what will happen here.