Utah geologists are now researching the combination of causes and how to maintain the thickness of the salt crust and prevent the footprint of the area from shrinking further. When miners draw mineral-rich water from the aquifer underneath the flats and it doesn’t replenish naturally, nearby groundwater encroaches and causes the footprint to shrink. A combination of changes in the environment and human activities like mining and high-speed racing have caused the Bonneville Salt Flats to shrink. Their turns and skids leave tire tracks at the edge of the world-renowned Speedway.īut much as it has for millennia, the landscape is evolving. Racers flock here and drive rocket ship-looking vehicles up to 600 miles per hour (966 kilometers per hour). The salt is ideal terrain for racecar driving - it’s flat enough to accelerate and moist enough to prevent tires from overheating at high speeds. The crystals can look like snow, a moonscape or even another planet. The landscape is flat, but for 1-inch-raised hexagons of salt crystals formed by cycles of flooding and evaporation.

But elsewhere, it’s dried out, including at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Water remains in some parts of the lake’s footprint, including Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The area is what’s leftover from Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that filled after an Ice Age thousands of years ago.

If you want those cool reflective photos, youll need to go in the. In the American West - a region with no shortage of other-worldly landscapes - this crystalline expanse near the Utah-Nevada line is an awe-striking natural wonder. We visited in March and still were able to drive out onto them, it just depends on weather.

Photos of utah salt flats