Bonneville Salt Flats: Speed Without Scenery

The salt flats you are crossing are the floor of ancient Lake Bonneville, a freshwater lake that covered most of western Utah during the last ice age. At its maximum extent, roughly eighteen thousand years ago, Lake Bonneville was about the size of Lake Michigan and considerably deeper. As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, the lake evaporated.

The salt that remained, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, magnesium compounds, forms a crust over the old lakebed that is in some places almost five feet thick. The surface is flat to within an inch across ten miles, which is flatter than most engineering projects can achieve intentionally. That flatness is why the Bonneville Salt Flats became the land speed racing capital of the world.

In nineteen thirty-five, Sir Malcolm Campbell drove Bluebird to a land speed record of three hundred one miles per hour on this surface. The record has been broken many times since. The standing record for a wheel-driven vehicle exceeds four hundred miles per hour.

The course used for the Speed Week events each August runs about ten miles across the flats north of the interstate. You can see it from the highway, the black rubber marks across the white salt. The flats are smaller than they were.

Potash mining operations that pump brine from under the salt and process it in evaporation ponds to the south have been cited by environmentalists as a factor in salt flat reduction. The area available for racing has shrunk measurably over the last sixty years. The Goshute people lived across this basin.

Their name means desert people, and they had adapted to survival in one of the harshest environments in North America. This landscape was not empty before the racers came to it.