It's Not Snow...

Welcome to Day 11 readers! Day 11 finds me in Wendover, Utah, which is among the smallest towns I stopped in on this trip. I did manage to wake up in time to catch the tail end of the continental breakfast at the motel, which was a couple of cereal containers and plastic bowls and spoons in the front desk room. As usual, I was in a rush, so I threw my stuff in the car and drove down the road, across the state line actually, to the Starbucks in one of the big casinos in West Wendover. I really wanted to get my facts about the Salt Flats correct before I drove out there. I'd forgotten how scruffy I already was by that morning:

Over a latte and apple fritter, I read everything I thought I'd need to know about the flats while a few elderly people played the slot machines nearby with some pretty vacant expressions on their faces. It did not look like an appealing lifestyle. My final stop before the flats was a dollar store where I bought, you guessed it, $6 sunscreen! The sunscreen was crucial to my success this fine Thursday.

The Bonneville Salt Flats is a large, 40 square mile salt pan and state park, and it is informally known as the Mecca of Speed. The Top Gear guys were very excited to visit this place because they're "gearheads", and I was equally excited! I'd read about it since I was a kid, and it was an item crossed off the bucket list once I got there. Because the salt flats are so large, multiple "racetracks" are set up in the salt, and this is the location where numerous land speed records have been set. One jet-powered car has even broken the sound barrier on these very flats, going 763mph! This isn't a place to set 0-60 records since the salt, particularly after rain, is very slick. Bonneville is so flat for so many miles that one can actually see the curvature of the earth!

Around 1pm, I got on I-80 heading east, and took Exit 4 toward the state park. Normally a random exit 4 wouldn't matter, but in this case, if you do miss that exit, you have to drive dozens of miles further east where the next exit is, and you can't turn around before then. This part of Utah, then, is sparse on people, and wildlife. Anyhow, I got to the end of the road where the salt begins, and a gatekeeper stopped me for a $10 toll. He tried to convince me not to take my own car out there on the salt, even going so far as to say that he wouldn't take his own car out there for $10,000. I was like, I'm doing this, I've come a long way to turn around now! I'd already topped 3,000 total miles the day before.

He called over another tattooed guy who needed a ride out to the track, so off I went with a stranger sitting next to me, telling me about the flats. I found out quickly though that they're not perfectly flat, and there were plenty of ruts and bumps in the salt created by recent rains.

We arrived at the staging area, I let him off, and parked and got out with the camera to take in the scenery:

 You can see how much salt had already been washed up into my wheel wells from just driving out to the staging area, which was what the guy at the entrance had been talking about.

 Looks like snow, doesn't it? Like total whiteout:

As I walked around the tents and truck and trailers and whatnot, I found out that this was the very last day of Bike Week, for motorcycles, and that I was incredibly fortunate to even be on the flats because this was the last day the park was going to be open for this season. I'd had no idea this was the last possible day to be there, so clearly God willed it! The staging area was near the cones that made the parallel lines where the bikers were to do their speed runs:

I even found some Canadians here to do some racing eh?

This Jeep got showered in salt obviously:

The thing about salt is that it's extremely corrosive to metal, basically starts eating away at a car's underbelly immediately. That's why it's not recommended to take your own car out on the salt, but the reward of driving at automotive hallowed ground outweighs the risks with salt corrosion.

These next two pictures were made to look like the weird scene with all the Jack Sparrows in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 which was filmed at Bonneville, and they also show how bright the salt is:

The sun's reflection off the salt is so bright, it's even more blinding than snow up in the mountains if you can picture that. That's why I was slathered in sunscreen on every exposed square inch of skin, wearing a long sleeve shirt to cover my California sunburn even though it was over 90 degrees, and wearing a hat (I don't like hats). I didn't take my sunglasses off at all on this day except to look at the small screen on the camera. It wasn't comfortable, but I was very taken with this place, it felt like what I'd imagine standing on the Moon would feel like:

Such an alien looking place, like another planet. I'm told the mirages from the heat in the summer are so fierce that it makes the surrounding mountains look like they are floating above the horizon of salt. I tried to capture that effect, with varying degrees of success:

Sometime this afternoon, I fired the car back up and ventured out toward the racing pits, but was turned away and told I couldn't go there. I did a few powerslides on the slick salt on the way back to the staging area for fun. It was very gloomy by mid-afternoon, dark clouds and rain threatened in the distance:

Ok, so I'd walked quite a few laps of this place by about 3pm, and was thinking about leaving. I'd been walking with Charlie's camera around my neck the whole time, and that was what caught the attention of a racer under a tent who asked me to take pictures of her and her team around their bike with her camera. I agreed, and took pictures of the team, and in return, they let me have a Team Tracy shirt and sit on the bike with the crew around me!

This was the coolest part of being at Bonneville. Tracy told me she had achieved 170 mph in a standing mile on that bike that day, and my reply was that I'd done 130 mph the day before in Nevada. She asked, was that clocked? I said, nope! Got away with it. Good times. I still have that shirt, it made a great impromptu souvenir. It was nice to be able to reply to her speed mark with one that wasn't 100 mph less than hers. I said goodbye to the crew, and got back in the car to make the bumpy drive back to the main road:

My other souvenir from Bonneville is a plastic bag filled with several pounds of salt that I scooped up before I left, knowing there aren't many places to just collect that big of a lump of salt. Here's some pictures of how soggy the flats were that day after a rainy stretch of days:

Here's a picture of the sign at the entrance to the park:

After I got back on tarmac, I drove to the Salt Flats Café, which had pictures of fast cars covering the walls, and dove into three large, very red sauced enchiladas. After that I had to wait in line at the power wash station, and once I got ahold of the hoses, proceeded to blast the underside and wheel wells of my car for a solid 15 minutes. That event will play a minor role on Day 12.

It was 4pm when I got back on I-80 going east, and this was another really long, really straight road. So much so, in fact, that the state of Utah had taken it upon themselves to put up speed signs telling motorists how many seconds it takes to drive 1 mile, 2 miles, 3 miles, etc. going the speed limit of 75mph. I assume this is to help us focus, and not get sucked into the ribbon of road that goes seemingly infinitely into the distance ahead of me:

After a while on I-80, the gloom gave way to the Wasatch Range of mountains in front of me:

The Wasatch Front contains the second largest metro area in the Mountain West region, Salt Lake City. The metro area is one of the longest in the nation, as it is 81 miles from Provo in the south to Ogden in the north. The area contains around 75% of Utah’s population, and is sprawling in the suburbs like Vegas and Denver.

You what else I found along I-80? What appears to be an actual salt mine, like people go back to after lunch in corporate America:

Before I passed by the big lake, I found a glassy-smooth smaller lake to the west:

Here’s the brief glimpse I got of the Great Salt Lake:

I can’t explain why, but I never really felt compelled to stop at the Great Salt Lake; I hadn’t done any research on it prior to this day. Maybe I was tired of sightseeing by this point, as I was getting off the highway here near the airport to check in at the Airport Inn Hotel:

After I got all my stuff into the hotel room, I…did not much of anything interesting for the rest of the day. I rested for an hour or two once I was in the room, and then I ventured out for Chick-fil-A and to find a Redbox to drop off the movie I’d had since California. Good job, Matt!

I know I drove toward downtown looking for food and maybe Starbucks, but I was unsuccessful there, so I turned around and drove west toward West Valley City, which sounds totally easy when you know how griddy Salt Lake’s road network is. The minor problem was that Salt Lake’s major roads have names like S 5600 W, W 2100 S, and even W 700 N. I still found the Chick-fil-A, but my reaction when seeing those road names on my phone was something like “What the heck?!” Anyhow, mission accomplished, took nuggets back to hotel room and settled down for the evening to upload photos and do more research on the upcoming segments of the trip. I didn’t get to bed till super late, probably because of overresting when I first got to the hotel around 4 that afternoon. I’ll leave you with the 3 videos from the Top Gear road trip from San Francisco to Bonneville that I’d imitated over the past 3 days: