Elite trail runner Dakota Jones has never been content to simply race. Over the past decade, he's built a reputation not just for his performances at events like Hardrock 100 and Sierre-Zinal, but for using his platform to push conversations the running world doesn't always feel comfortable having. His latest project, Where the Water Was, is his most ambitious effort yet.
The film documents Jones running across the exposed lakebed of Utah's Great Salt Lake, a landscape that should, by all rights, be underwater. It's part environmental portrait, part athletic undertaking, and part urgent public warning. And it arrives at a moment when the trail running community is increasingly asking itself a pointed question: if you love wild places, what are you actually doing to protect them?
A Lake Disappearing in Plain Sight
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere. Or it was. Since the 1980s, the lake has lost roughly 73% of its water volume, shrinking from approximately 3.3 million acre-feet to less than 900,000 acre-feet at its lowest points in recent years. The shoreline has retreated by miles in every direction, exposing a vast, cracked basin of sediment and salt.
The causes are layered. Decades of upstream water diversion for agriculture and urban development have starved the lake of its primary inflow rivers. Climate change has accelerated evaporation and reduced snowpack in the Wasatch Range, the mountains that historically fed the lake each spring. The result is a feedback loop that's proving extremely difficult to reverse.
What's left behind on the lakebed isn't just empty space. The exposed sediment contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that accumulated over centuries of natural deposition and industrial activity. When the wind picks up, those particles go airborne. Salt Lake City already sits in a valley prone to inversion events. Adding toxic dust from a shrinking lake bed makes that air quality problem significantly worse, and researchers estimate that millions of people in the region are exposed to elevated particulate risk on high-wind days.
The ecological consequences are equally serious. The lake supports enormous populations of migratory birds, including eared grebes, American avocets, and Wilson's phalaropes. It's a critical stopover on the Pacific Flyway. Brine shrimp, which thrive in hypersaline conditions, form the base of that food web and support a commercial harvesting industry worth tens of millions of dollars annually. As salinity levels spike with reduced water volume, even brine shrimp populations are under stress.
What 'Where the Water Was' Actually Shows
Jones's film doesn't approach this crisis with graphs and talking heads. It uses the physicality of trail running as its primary narrative tool. You watch Jones move across terrain that looks almost post-apocalyptic: cracked salt flats stretching to the horizon, rusted industrial remnants half-buried in sediment, occasional brine pools that glow pink from halophilic bacteria still clinging to existence.
The film was shot over multiple visits to the lakebed, working with environmental scientists and local water policy advocates who provided context for what Jones was seeing on the ground. The running footage is intentionally raw, capturing the physical effort of moving across unstable, unpredictable terrain rather than presenting a polished athletic spectacle.
That choice matters. Jones has spoken in interviews about wanting viewers to feel the disorientation of running somewhere that shouldn't exist, that the sensation of covering ground where a lake used to be should carry its own emotional weight without requiring narration to spell it out.
The project also incorporates interviews with Indigenous community members whose relationship with the lake predates modern water law by thousands of years, as well as hydrologists, birders, and farmers who find themselves on opposite sides of water allocation debates. Jones doesn't pretend those tensions have easy resolutions. The film is more interested in making them visible than in resolving them.
Trail Runners as Environmental Advocates
Jones isn't alone in this space. Across the trail and ultra scene, a recognizable pattern has emerged: elite runners with significant social media followings and media relationships are increasingly pairing their athletic work with explicit environmental advocacy. Some are focusing on plastic pollution in mountain race corridors. Others are partnering with land conservation organizations or testifying at state water board hearings.
The trend has accelerated noticeably in 2026, driven partly by a generational shift in who holds elite status in the sport and partly by a broader cultural moment in which audiences, particularly in the US, UK, and Australia, expect the athletes and brands they follow to have a position on environmental issues. Silence on these questions is increasingly read as a position in itself.
Trail running has a particular relationship to place that makes this advocacy feel organic rather than performative. When you train in a specific mountain range for years, when your race calendar is built around alpine seasons and snowpack depth, climate change stops being abstract. It shows up in trail closures, in altered race routes, in the disappearance of water sources that were reliable a decade ago. The running community has a ground-level view of environmental change that's hard to replicate from a policy desk.
That intimacy with landscape is also what makes projects like Jones's compelling to audiences well beyond the trail running world. You don't need to have run an ultramarathon to recognize the image of a man running across a dry lakebed as a statement about what's being lost.
The Nutrition and Recovery Demands Behind the Project
It's worth noting what it actually takes to run on the Great Salt Lake lakebed, because the physical challenge is real. The terrain is unpredictable: sections of salt crust that look solid can give way, surfaces are uneven, heat reflection off the white flats intensifies the thermal load on your body, and there's no shade, no soft ground, and no easy bail-out route.
For an athlete preparing to spend extended time on that kind of surface, fueling strategy becomes critical. The research on carb timing for endurance performance is particularly relevant here: maintaining glycogen availability during sustained efforts in high-heat environments requires deliberate, proactive fueling rather than reactive eating when you feel depleted.
Recovery between shoots was equally demanding. Jones has been open about the cumulative fatigue of combining a competitive race schedule with a film production timeline. The emerging science around compounds like blueberries and their effect on running recovery suggests that dietary antioxidants play a measurable role in reducing exercise-induced inflammation, which matters when you're asking your body to perform on consecutive hard days with limited rest.
Why This Moment, Why This Lake
The Great Salt Lake has spent years generating alarming headlines without generating sufficient policy action. Utah passed a package of water conservation measures in 2023, and the lake did see some modest water level recovery in 2023 and 2024 following above-average snowpack years. But hydrologists are clear that structural changes to water allocation are the only path to long-term stabilization. Temporary weather variation isn't a solution.
Jones chose this lake, at this moment, because it sits at an intersection of issues that are easy to separate in policy debates but impossible to separate on the ground: water rights, Indigenous sovereignty, agricultural economics, urban growth, air quality, and wildlife habitat. The Great Salt Lake crisis is a useful lens for understanding how environmental problems actually work, as interconnected systems rather than isolated issues with isolated fixes.
The trail running community is also a particularly effective audience for that kind of complexity. Ultrarunners are used to holding multiple things in mind simultaneously, pacing, terrain, weather, nutrition, crew logistics, and they tend to be comfortable with ambiguity and long timelines. These aren't people who need a problem to be wrapped up neatly before they'll engage with it.
If you're looking at what's happening in the trail world beyond race results and gear reviews, the wave of athlete-led environmental projects is one of the more significant stories of the past two years. The London 2027 British Olympic Marathon Trial and the Sydney Marathon 2027 ballot opening reflect the continued institutional expansion of running as a global sport. But projects like Where the Water Was reflect something different: a community that's starting to ask what it owes to the landscapes that made it.
That's a harder question than any race result. And it's one that Dakota Jones, at least, seems willing to keep running toward.