Over the last hundred years or so the Bonneville Salt Flats have mostly dried up and left a hard surface miles and miles long that is just perfect for flooring the throttle and seeing what your race car can really do. But in “modern times,” the lake remnants became what is now known as Great Salt Lake, the one by Salt Lake City, and the Bonneville Salt Flats a hundred miles west of that. Since the great draining of Lake Bonneville those tens of thousands of years ago, the remnants of the once-great lake literally ebbed and flowed. Bad if you were an ancient dino-shark eating as many fish as you felt like eating all day long only to find yourself in what would become an Idaho potato field (oh, how the mighty always fall!), but good if you were a land speed racer. Then, 16,800 years ago-geologists are very precise on this-something let loose and almost all of Lake Bonneville drained out into what is now southern Idaho. If you look up at the mountains surrounding what are now the Bonneville Salt Flats, home of the greatest land speed racing the world has ever known, you can still see ancient shorelines hundreds of feet above the burning white flatness. In pre-historic, pre-human, and pre-Bonneville Speed Week times, there was a body of water in western Utah known as Lake Bonneville. You can’t blame everything on potash mining.
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