Speed & Salt: The History of Bonneville

Thanks to the Ice Age, we were given the Bonneville Salt Flats upon which thousands of land speed racers have enjoyed nearly a century of high-speed, record-setting fun and excitement. The world’s biggest racetrack, some 4,214 feet above sea level, is also the world’s largest natural “dynamometer.”

Located immediately east of the Nevada-Utah border town of Wendover, the vast, ancient lake bed is a stark, glistening white plain that was once covered by a body of water 135 miles wide by nearly 325 miles long. Much smaller today, the Bonneville Salt Flats remain an awe-inspiring geologic phenomenon where after a rainstorm full, 180-degree, vivid rainbows appear. Mother Nature left some 6,000 acres of “flat track” which is so hard that it takes a two-handed, half-inch drill to bore through the rock-hard, concrete-like surface.