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The Bonneville Salt Flats are a pretty astounding place, as I mentioned in our recent story on the Grand National Roadster Show’s upcoming celebration of 100 years of land-speed racing there. And while Bonneville seems a desert of desolation and inactivity, plenty’s actually going on under the surface there – quite literally, as local mining has reportedly reduced the amount of salt on the flats, making racing there tougher. However, efforts have been under way for several years now to reverse this trend.
According to the Save the Salt Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the Bonneville Salt Flats, at one point the flats encompassed more than 96,000 acres, more than three times the current 30,000-acre expanse, which the Bureau of Land Management currently oversees. Once a lake about 1,000 feet deep, the flats still flood every year, and when they dry, the waters leave behind a crust of mostly salt that varies from a few inches thick at the edges up to two feet thick in the center.
However, a few other minerals are mixed in with the salt as well, including potash, which nearby mining operations have stripped from the salt flats as far back as 1917. As pointed out in a 2011 Wall Street Journal article about the salt flats, the mining operations have largely treated the potash-stripped salt as a waste product by leaving it in great mounds to dissolve back into the salt flats over hundreds of years, and the Save the Salt Coalition places direct blame on the potash mining operations for the shrinking salt flats.
Whether the blame’s to be placed on the mining operations seems to be a question not yet definitively answered, but the Save the Salt Coalition, founded in 1989, convinced the potash mining companies to begin to replenish the flats with the salt they extracted from it from 1997 to 2002. The replenishment continues today, and while the BLM has signed off on its effectiveness – and has mandated that it continue – the flats seem to be growing no thicker or larger as a result, leading to repeated incidents of racers and their trailers sinking in the mud under the salt crust over the years as well as calls for the BLM and the potash mining companies to do more to restore Bonneville to its historic dimensions.
