Not 2004 when the state put up a sign pointing to it. Not 2002, when my sister first took a college date out to see it but Artforum's Nico Israel couldn't find it. 1994.
After a Salt Lake City artist friend, Patrick Barth, told me that Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was partially visible in mid-summer 1994, I drove to the Jetty in my sister's car--no way I'd take my own car--in early August 1994. The larger rocks were visible, forming a fragmentary outline of the structure. They were all covered in glistening salt crystals.
So please, enough with the, it re-emerged whenever the New York Times first found out about it nonsense.
