When you’re just about 30 minutes from the Nevada border, I swear they just pop out from nowhere. The salt flats are about 2 hours west of Salt Lake City and you really don’t see them until you see them! About an hour in, you’re going to be thinking, “ WHERE THE HECK ARE THEY?!” Don’t you worry your pretty little heart, they’re there. The salt flats are 12 miles long and 5 miles wide with total area coverage of just over 46 square miles.
The salt flats are a 30,000 acre expanse of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake basin in Utah. "I'm actually optimistic that this upcoming year, if we have a really nice, hot summer that evaporates all the brine, will be good for racing," Bernau said.Let’s take a little trip west of Salt Lake City to a magical land called Bonneville Salt Flats. The water will go, but the salt will stay.
"Having a wetter climate, or more rainfall, is better for the long-term health of the salt crust," he said. He said having this much water at the Salt Flats is a great thing to see. "What is most likely to lead to a racing event being canceled is if we have a rainfall occurring in the summer," Bernau said. Visitors still flock to the Salt Flats, but the unusually high water makes some people, particularly those in the racing community, nervous. "All that salt that dissolves when we have all this rain, it's not going anywhere," Bernau said. Bernau said ice has been spotted on the surface of the floodwaters. The usually desolate, white raceway now looks more like a giant puddle. As you go away from that, it gets a lot thinner out to the edges," he said. "There's a much deeper area that can get maybe one to two feet deep. Last year's Speed Week event was canceled because of it, but Bernau said the amount of water that's collected at the Salt Flats right now is significant. It's not unusual to see some flooding at the Salt Flats. "There's a lot of water that has come into the system recently." He said this is the wettest he's ever seen it. Geologist Jeremiah Bernau with the Utah Geological Survey has studied the Salt Flats for six years. TOOELE - The Bonneville Salt Flats have flooded after all the rain Utah received this winter.
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