The Great Salt Lake
A basin whose rivers never reach the sea
▶ Play it onlineMost watersheds end at the sea. This one ends in the middle of the continent, in a lake that has no way out, which is why it is salty: rivers bring in a little dissolved salt, the sun takes the water away, and the salt stays behind. The Bear River, its biggest river, loops north into Idaho and back before it reaches the lake. The Weber and the Jordan come down from the Wasatch, the Jordan by way of Utah Lake. The lakes are fixed in the frame, and the pieces are the land that drains into them.
What a child works out
- Not every river reaches the sea; some basins are closed.
- A lake with no outlet turns salty because only the water leaves.
- A river can wander a long way to reach a lake that is close by.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 176 × 250 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on The Great Salt Lake.
The plate
- Pieces
- 14 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.6 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 2.22
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 117 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
6 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Bear Lake
- Blue Creek
- Jordan
- Little Bear
- Malad
- Weber
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North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00