The Bonneville Salt Flats and Childhood Memories
- brucepressler
- Jun 7, 2024
- 3 min read
When I was younger, I had only heard of the Bonneville Salt Flats from car commercials on T.V. Driving, it becomes obvious why they would film car commercials there. The white of the flats, the bright blue sky, and being known as the flattest place on earth make the Bonneville Salt Flats a quite impressive backdrop. The public can drive on the salt and there is no speed limit. Driving is allowed in certain area so you don’t crack through.
We drove interstate 80 through the salt flats, which are a part of the Great Salt Lake Desert at the beginning and also the end of our road trip. We stayed in Wendover Utah both times on the way to and from Colorado. Wendover is on the border between Utah and Nevada.
West Wendover on the Nevada side has casinos and a music venue. Of the 5,000 people that live in the W. Wendover NV and Wendover UT. three quarters of them live on the Nevada side.
The Great Salt Lake Desert runs from the Nevada border to Salt Lake City and the salt flats come pretty fast as you drive east out of Wendover on interstate 80. To me, driving along a “no end in sight” road, with gleaming white salt along both sides, while being the only car on the road In the early morning made for a very hypnotic drive.
The salt flats are the remains of Lake Bonneville from about 20,000 years ago and are the flattest place on earth. A great place to race cars at high speeds. Along the way, off in the distance is the Silver Island Mountain Range. The flats are already at 4,200 feet. We are 120 miles from Slat Lake City.
The Bonneville Salt Flats end and the Great Salt Lake Desert. Begins. That’s what you see while driving and looking at the map navigation system. But actually, the entire desert is an extinct lake bed and the Bonneville Salt Flats are just a part of the Great Salt Lake Desert. The drive through the desert takes about and hour and forty minutes. It seemed much longer to me. We had great weather. Being that this is the high desert, the winter weather can be treacherous driving.
In the salt flats, we saw this sculpture. It came up too fast so this pictures is taken from the web.
A road trip, I knew, was going to create new memories for the family; Mark, Ari, and me. I didn’t foresee the memories that would be rekindled from places I had never been to before.
You never know what will trigger memories. As we were hypnotically driving through the salt flats, I remembered watching television with my family. Watching those Pontiac Grand Am commercials. Remembering a time when you had to be home to watch a show, we had three, and then about 10 channels counting both UHF and VHF.
It would have been in the late 1960’s early 70’s; a time of political turmoil and our country was involved in a war on the halfway around world. It sounds like today, but there was no 24 hour news coverage and it was easier to escape into T.V. Shows like “The Streets of San Francisco” or “The Merv Griffin Show”
On the other end of the road trip As Mark was driving back home through the Bonnieville Salt Flats I was remembering the commercials and telling him about how my Mom used to make comments to the television. How an interracial kiss between Vic Damon and Diahann Carroll on “The Mike Douglas Show” raised my awareness. Mom, said “that would never be shown in the South”. I asked why and learned a little about racism outside our suburban California bubble.
The. Bonneville Salt Flats and the whole Great Salt Lake Desert is a beautiful minimalist landscape. Due to climate change, a thinning of the salt crust has been noticed by researchers. This is a result of decades of drought and a reduced water flow. Interestingly, racers in the 1960’s first noticed the thinning of the salt crust. Researchers are experimenting with ways to save the salt flats. The best proposal seems to be to reduce groundwater use. Even with the changes, the Bonneville Salt Flats will be around for generations.