Photos by the author.
[Editor’s Note: Contributor Mike Taylor’s summer cross-country trip included a stop at the famous Bonneville Salt Flats, where he learned that not every trip to the land-speed racing venue ends up in glory and thrills.]
About four miles north of Interstate 80, not far from the Utah-Nevada border, the Bonneville Salt Flats stretch out from the end of a two-lane access road into 44,000 acres of pale white flatness. The only relief comes from the stark Silver Island Mountains rimming the basin. Standing at the edge of the salt flats, it’s not hard to conjure up images of Craig Breedlove or Gary Gabelich blasting across at 600 miles an hour.
Every year, people come from all over the world to have a go at the salt flats – let’s get the family Ford out there and see what she’ll do on this piece of utter wasteland where there are no speed limits.
And every year, they get stuck, really stuck, sometimes mired up to the axles in salt that hasn’t quite dried out from the millions of gallons of water that have been sitting on the flats during the rainy season. In fact, the Bonneville speed trials are held in August, September and October. Those are the dry months.
Morgan Hardy outside his truck stop near Wendover, Utah.
“Everybody wants to ride on Bonneville,” says Morgan Hardy, owner of the Salt Flats Truck Stop, a gas station, restaurant and souvenir shop that is the nearest outpost of civilization to the racing area. “It’s free and you can go as fast as you want – or dare.”
It’s free because the area is public land, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. You, the taxpayer, can take your new Corvette out on the 10-mile-long strip used for timing land speed records and see how close you can get to the 200 MPH mark on the speedometer. No cops in the rearview mirror.
No speed limit signs. Hardy has seen a pair of 1955 Mercedes-Benz gullwings go out there – the owner shipped them from Germany – and he has seen a 1927 Bentley trundle out on the salt (the owner kept it to 82 MPH, wary of blowing up the engine in such an isolated place).
More frequently, however, Hardy sees the curious, the ones who are coming through the area – I-80 is one of the main transcontinental routes – and see the Bonneville signs and ask him about driving out on the flats.
“They come in here and they say ‘can we go out there?,’” Hardy says. “Like these newlyweds, on their honeymoon. I say, don’t go out there; you’ll get stuck. About an hour later, they show up. His wife is beating on him, ‘The guy told you not to go out there.’ They’re in here, raiding the ATM.”
They’re trying to empty the ATM because it can cost up to $750 – cash only – to get that Ford or Chevy or Toyota out of the muck.
Rick “Mr. Tow” Davidson
Some of that money will end up, on a regular basis, in the pockets of Rick (“Mr. Tow”) Davidson, who, for the past 20 years, has been pulling all manner of stuck truck or car out of the track where Gary Gabelich went roaring past in his Blue Flame rocket-powered car at 630 miles an hour in October 1970.
“They get stuck and they call me,” Davidson said the other day, adding that his rates start at $300 for a salt flats extrication. “I load up the mudcat (something like a ski-trail grooming machine) and go out there on the salt and rescue them.” Davidson has seen his share of oddities.
“There was a lady who was hired to take a new Mercedes-Benz from California to some place back east, and she came through. Decided to take the car out on the salt flats. She got stuck.” On the way in, impatient with the pace of the tow truck, “she got unhooked (from the truck) and took off. Then she got stuck again,” Davidson said.
A mudcat used for towing stuck cars.
It happens all the time – Hardy says at least three or four times a week – and Davidson said just the other day some tourists ran out of gas and when Davidson replenished their car’s tank, they asked him about the salt flats.
He wearily repeated the warning – “Don’t go out there” – and, of course, they did. And had to have Davidson extricate their rental car.
And, so, the curious come to this desolate place. When I was there in early July, there were only a couple of SUVs (parked firmly on pavement) out there at the end of the paved road, where the only thing that reminds you of civilization is the weathered steel sign, pockmarked with bullet holes, that says the area was “named after Captain B.L. Bonneville, an early military explorer of the west.”
Nineteenth-century adventurers slogged across “the vast saline plain only to return with awesome stories of the salt’s harshness,” the sign states. Near the end of this colorful description comes a warning – “Caution: salt crust may appear firm but is often moist and unstable.”
For his part, Davidson has no fear of going broke in the business of towing cars off the moist and unstable flats.
“People come out here and they say, ‘I’ve got four-wheel-drive. I can get out of anything.’ Then they get stuck.”