Bonneville Salt Flats - worth it, and the free version might be worth more

Most of the Bonneville Salt Flats is the drive, a couple of hours to get there and then several more once you have arrived, because the point of the salt flats is to go out onto them rather than to look at them from the edge.

Budget half a day and nothing will feel rushed. Two hours will leave you having spent most of them behind the wheel and almost none of them on the salt.

Outline map of the United States with Bonneville Salt Flats marked in northwest Utah — Northwest Utah, hard against the Nevada line, roughly 110 miles west of Salt Lake City.

Getting out there

Access is from Interstate 80 at Exit 4, near Wendover, where you head north following the signs for the Speedway before turning right onto Leppy Pass Road.

There is no entrance fee and no ticket booth, and although a parking area sits at the end of the road, parking is not really the consideration here. The point is to drive out onto the salt under your own steam.

We came from Salt Lake City, north to the interstate and then west along it for roughly two hours.

Wash the car. Then wash it again.

The surface is not uniform. Where enough vehicles have passed it has been flattened into something even and predictable, while everywhere else you are travelling over built-up salt and crushing it as you go.

Resist the temptation to aim for the taller drifts. There is nothing to be gained from them, and the salt is corrosive.

Wash the vehicle the same day you come off the flats, and wash it thoroughly, then keep washing it through the week that follows, paying attention to every nook and cranny, because the salt works its way into all of them and stays there.

Speed Week, if you are not a car person

I went during Speed Week, which is the only reason I paid anything at all. For the rest of the year the flats sit there open and free, and nobody is charging anyone to drive out onto them.

If you are properly into cars, Speed Week is a real event. The machines are homebuilt and engineered for extraordinary speed, and the people who turn up have come to study them.

I am not properly into cars, and what I got was standing in the sun, sweating, and trying not to burn. A launch lasts seconds. The car is too far away to follow almost immediately, and there are no good vantage points to watch it from, even with binoculars.

I saw about two launches in an hour, then wandered off and called it a day.

Speed Week is a once thing. The salt flats are a repeatable thing. I am glad I saw the racing, but if I go back it will be on an ordinary free day with nobody else out there, and I suspect that is the better version of the place.

What we did not know

There are onX offroad trails threaded all around the flats, and they take you up around the edge to look down on the whole thing from above.

We drove straight out onto the salt instead, which meant we saw it from the middle, and from the middle flat just looks like flat. Next time I would go round the outside first and take in the scale from a height before driving onto it.

There is no shade for thirty miles, and the salt throws the sun straight back up at you. What the video does not show is the breeze. It was never aggressive, just steady air moving across all that flatness, and it kept us feeling cooler than we actually were.

Daisy, a pale sage Bronco Sport, parked alone on the salt flats with white salt running out to distant mountains on every side — Daisy out on the salt. Thirty miles of it, and no shade anywhere.