The first land speed record was set during races at Bonneville in 1914, and the current Bonneville Salt Flats racing events welcome cars, trucks and motorcycles as they race to set the highest speed achieved by a person using a vehicle on land. There are five major land speed racing events that happen here each year, including legendary Speed Week.

Since then, the Bonneville Salt Flats have been touted as one of the world’s premier land speed “racetracks” in the world. The entire area is free public land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), though people have been traveling across and recreating on the famous Bonneville Salt Flats for thousands of years.īy 1907, a couple of local businessmen test drove a Pierce-Arrow on the salt flats and by 1910, the first permanent railway stretched across the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Bonneville Salt Flats is an ancient dry lake bed of the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, began forming at the end of the last Ice Age, and is known to be the largest of a series of salt flats on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake.

Straddling the Nevada-Utah state line, the Bonneville Salt Flats have been made famous as the location of many land speed records set at the Bonneville Speedway, and remains stunning if you’re road tripping your way to Nevada during Speed Week or not. As you make your way to the Silver State there’s yet another gotta-experience-it landscape at the world-renowned Bonneville Salt Flats. From the Playa made famous by the annual Burning Man event, to our Valley of Fire, to our charcoal kilns used to propel Silver State mining pursuits, to our 300+ natural hot springs, Nevada is known for its impressive geology and otherworldly landscapes that in many cases, are better experienced than explained.

Camping in the bonneville salt flats