Place #2: Bonneville Salt Flats
It’s time for the second place in the “Places to Go” series: The Bonneville Salt Flats. You may have heard of it before, as it is home to the annual Bonneville Speed Week, and has been the location for many land speed records in the past. It’s about 110 miles west of Salt Lake City, and while visiting a friend there, we decided to make the drive out to see it. We weren’t sure what to expect. Would there be a visitor’s center? Could we even get to it? Could we just go out and drive on it? We certainly hoped so! Turns out we could. More after the jump…
On the way out, we passed some salt mining operations, and notably, the rather strange looking statue you see above. Not only strange for the unique look, but for the fact that it is locatedon the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere! A bit further on, it became clear that we were driving along the edge of the Bonneville flats. We contemplated, but ultimately resisted, the urge to pull off of the interstate and go for a spin on the salt right there.
Instead, we stopped at the rest area right on the edge of the flats. Here we got our first taste (really, it is salty) of the flats on foot. It’s a pretty impressive site; a huge expanse of completely flat (but rough) white surface made of salt. Again we contemplated whether it was OK to just take off onto the flats and drive around — we were really hoping to see how fast Vivek’s car would go — but decided first to continue on to the next exit and explore what looked to be a road into the national park area.
As it turns out, if you get off that exit (Utah exit 4) and continue down to the end of the road, you come upon a solitary gas station with a little cafe inside (filled with people, surprisingly), and a road leading out into the salt. A little ways in the road ends, with a sign to announce that you are at the Bonneville salt flats. It basically says, have fun and don’t mess it up too much. It sounded like an open invitation to drive like mad men, so we pointed the car across the open salty plane and floored it! It was awesome! It goes on forever, with nothing in your way! After reaching the opposite end of the 10 mile or so long area, we found that parts of it were actually really muddy underneath the thin salty layer. Although barely noticeable when at speed, it meant we left some nice tire tracks, and once stopped it was really hard to accelerate back up to speed because the tires just spun.
Eventually we found the marked 10-mile track used for speed week, which is a straight groomed section with a line (just barely visible when we were there) painted down the middle.
All in all, it was a really cool place to see, and now we can say that we raced on the same track used by record holders (if not quite as fast). I did set a personal land-speed record though! The Pathfinder, by the way, tops out at around 112MPH. As usuals, the full-size pictures are available in the plogger gallery.