Bonneville Salt Flats: The Fastest Place on Earth

What you are looking at out here on the Utah salt desert is the bed of an ancient lake. About thirty thousand years ago, a body of water the size of Lake Michigan covered this entire basin, three hundred twenty-five miles long, a hundred and thirty-five miles wide, in places over a thousand feet deep. Geologists call it Lake Bonneville. It dried up roughly thirteen thousand years ago, and as it evaporated over subsequent millennia, it left behind a crust of salt up to six feet thick that is, among other things, the flattest natural surface on earth. You can see the curvature of the planet from the middle of it.

Someone figured out fairly quickly that a perfectly flat, perfectly hard, perfectly straight surface stretching to the horizon in every direction was ideal for going very fast. The first recorded speed trial here was in nineteen fourteen, when a driver named Teddy Tetzlaff ran his car to an unofficial speed of a hundred and forty-one miles per hour.

The modern era began in nineteen thirty-five, when British racer Sir Malcolm Campbell came to Bonneville after years of setting records at Daytona Beach. Campbell broke three hundred miles per hour here on September third of that year, three oh one miles per hour, a number that would have seemed fantastical a decade earlier. The record fell eighteen more times at Bonneville between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen seventy, with speeds essentially doubling. In nineteen sixty, Mickey Thompson became the first American to crack four hundred miles per hour. In nineteen seventy, Gary Gabelich drove a rocket-powered vehicle called the Blue Flame to six hundred thirty miles per hour, a record that stood for thirteen years.

Speed Week, the annual gathering of land speed racers, has run here since nineteen forty-nine. Hundreds of teams come every August with hot rods, motorcycles, streamliners, and belly tankers, chasing records in dozens of classes. The salt flats have been shrinking for decades, potash mining and reduced water flow from the mountains have thinned the crust, but Bonneville remains the spiritual home of the fastest vehicles humans have ever built on the ground.