Bonneville Speedway
Utah
The salt at Bonneville was three feet deep in the nineteen forties. By 2015 it was two inches.
The salt crust at Bonneville was once about three feet thick. In 2015 it measured two inches. Nobody is certain why. Studies going back to 1960 point toward local climate shifts and toward the salt mining that happens nearby. Someone tried pumping salt back onto the flats. It made no difference. Then heavy rain washed mud down off the surrounding mountains and spread it across roughly six miles of racing surface. Normally the racers would shift to another stretch of the flats, but mining had shrunk that option too. Speed Week, the biggest meet of the year and running since 1949, was cancelled in 2014 and again in 2015. The straightaways used to run nine miles. What remains is about two and a half. For decades the course was marked with a broad black line painted down the middle, until the center wore through and the line moved to the edges. Paint got expensive. The last event to use black lines was Speed Week in August 2009. Now it is flags and cones.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
Measured at as much at 3 ft (0.91 m) in the 1940s and 50s, it has been reduced to just 2 in (0.051 m) in 2015.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Wendover Air Force Base 7.7 mi The crews who dropped the atomic bombs learned their job at a desert airfield code-named Kingman, next to a town of about a hundred people.
- Aragonite Hazardous Waste Incinerator 46.7 mi A mining town that lasted only a few years left open shafts and an abandoned truck in the desert, and Utah's first hazardous waste incinerator went up right next door.