Salt Flats

Today we drove west on I-80 out of Salt Lake City and kept going for over an hour until we got to the Bonneville Salt Flats. We stopped at a rest area where you could get out and walk onto the salt flats. It was spooky because everything was so flat, and uniform, and bright. The mountains in the background look like maybe a 5 or 10 minute walk, but are actually 7 miles away to the west, and to the north they are as far as 15 miles away.

  This is looking west along the highway, between here and those mountains is the speedway, but you can’t see it because of the curvature of the Earth.

 

After taking in the scenery here, we continued west for about 6 miles and came upon the entrance to the speedway. We were in luck, as by chance there were racers today trying to set records for all different kinds of car categories. We drove out on the flats a couple of miles and then parked to watch the racing. The track is a little far away so the views are not very spectacular, but we can say we saw it. There was one car in a category which no one had ever raced before, so we saw it set the land speed record for that category.

It was fun just driving out on the flats, with salt getting all stuck to the jeep, looking like caked on snow. I tried to set some land speed records myself, I think I got the record for the jeep category.