SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Bonneville Salt Flats sit just off of a highway in a state nowhere near the ocean, but in parts they glimmer as white as a Caribbean beach.
Wonder, worry collide at Utah’s famed salt flats
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Bonneville Salt Flats sit just off of a highway in a state nowhere near the ocean, but in parts they glimmer as white as a Caribbean beach.
Truck drivers, selfie-stick wielding tourists and gamblers driving to the casinos of West Wendover, Nevada, are known to stop here to photograph the stark white landscape, along with canals of flowing water. The water’s color appears turquoise because it’s been dyed by a mining company that channels brine to ponds where it evaporates and leaves behind valuable minerals.
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. The area is what’s leftover from Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that filled after an Ice Age thousands of years ago.
Water remains in some parts of the lake’s footprint, including Utah’s Great Salt Lake. But elsewhere, it’s dried out, including at the Bonneville Salt Flats. The landscape is flat, but for 1-inch-raised hexagons of salt crystals formed by cycles of flooding and evaporation. The crystals can look like snow, a moonscape or even another planet.