Feb. 16, 1914 
Indicator Significance of Vegetation 
37 i 
Tooele Valley is broadly U-shaped in cross section, the mountains on 
either side rising somewhat abruptly from the valley floor. This abrupt 
change from valley plain to mountain is characteristic of many of the 
valleys of the region and is due to the extensive deposition of alluvium 
during some epoch prior to the Bonneville period. 
Tooele Valley is bounded on the east by the Oquirrh Mountains and 
on the west by the Stansbury or Aqui Range. The southern boundary 
is formed by a spur of the Stansbury Range and by the great Stockton 
embankment, which is composed of sand and water-worn gravel thrown 
up by the waters of Lake Bonneville and which separates Tooele Valley 
from Rush Valley. (The Stockton embankment is shown in extreme 
background of PI. XLV, fig. 3.) The summit of this embankment 
coincides with the highest shore line on the adjacent mountains. To the 
north the valley slopes downward to the southern shore of Great Salt 
Lake. The axis of the valley thus lies approximately on a north and 
south line, the land rising gradually from near the center to the mountain 
ranges on the east and west sides. The width of Tooele Valley at the 
northern end is about 18 miles, at the southern end it is about 13 miles, 
and its greatest length is approximately 16 miles. The total area of the 
valley floor is, roughly, 250 square miles. 
The slope of the valley from the sides and from the southern end to a 
line marked approximately by the highway from Salt Lake City to 
Grantsville is decidedly steep, as is indicated by the fact that the town 
of Tooele has an elevation above sea level of 4,900 feet, while Grants¬ 
ville, although less than 5 miles farther north, is 680 feet lower. 1 North 
of this line the slope becomes very gentle and the surface of this portion 
of the valley is plainlike. 
SALINE CONDITIONS OF TOOELE VALLEY 
The soils of Tooele Valley show a wide range in salinity, or, to use the 
more familiar term, in “alkali” content. The soils in the upper end of 
the valley and along the base of the foothills at either side, including a 
large alluvial fan northeast of the town of Tooele, are characterized by a 
low salt content. The other extreme is found in the flats adjacent to 
the lake, which in some cases contain such an excess of soluble salts as 
to prevent the development of a plant cover. The soils occupying the 
central portion of the valley are, as a rule, relatively free from salts in 
the surface foot, but the salinity of the subsoil is usually such as to 
exclude all deep-rooted plants except those that are salt-tolerant to a 
marked degree. The saline material in solution in the nearly saturated 
soils of the flats, like that of the lake itself, is made up largely of sodium 
chlorid. In fact, these flats have probably not infrequently been sub¬ 
merged by the rise of the lake, since records made by the United States 
1 The elevation of the surface of the water of Great Salt Take is about 4,200 feet. 
