salt flats, utah

Last Saturday, my friend Jason and I made another trek to the Salt Flats in northwest Utah. It’s actually right on the border to Nevada, about 2 minutes away. The Salt Flats is an incredible place — there is just this huge plain of tightly packed salt that stretches for miles in every direction, and you get to go out there and drive as fast as you freaking want. It’s great. 🙂

It’s also where a lot of world-record speeds are set, though I didn’t do any myself. I only got up to 120 mph this year, getting slightly nervous after that and backing off. I think Jason got around to 143 mph or so. Interestingly, it’s actually a lot easier to go fast and you don’t notice it nearly as much if you’re racing someone rather than just going fast by yourself.

We had a great time, though. Last year when I went the salt was kicking up everywhere and I literally caked my car in the stuff. It was at least half an inch thick on the back of my car, it was so crazy, and it took a very long time to clean off. This year, it was totally different. They had a long 8.2 mile strip of raceway completely flattened. It was just like driving on asphalt, it was so sturdy.

We met up with a professional photographer who wanted to build his portfolio, so took a lot of video of Jason driving his Mustang. The videos turned out really well, you can check them out here.

I had a lot more fun this year as well. Last time we went, I had just bought my car, and I was still learning how to use a stick shift, and I burned out my engine quite a bit screwing things up. This time I only choked about twice. Once, we found along the raceway this one part in the middle that was a little more salty than normal, and when we would peel out the salt would just spit up and go everywhere. So we decided to do a drag race starting from there, and as I took off, I redlined in first in no time flat, kicked it in second and kept spinning. I was in third gear by the time I had actually gone about 20 feet, because we could barely move. It was hilarious. 🙂

After we finished driving around for a few hours, we decided to go exploring a bit before leaving. I wanted to drive off in the distance and try and reach some mountains. We headed off, but the plains got really bumpy and it made us both a little nervous, since we didn’t wanna get stuck out there. As we were driving along though, in the middle of nowhere, we found a port-a-potty out there. It was at least 12 miles away from any roads, and I couldn’t even see it until we got quite a ways from the track. That was another highlight of our visit. Random toilets in the wilderness.

Jason put together a video of our visit in a blog post. Just as a warning, the first four minutes is of him singing, so you may want to skip ahead.

Good times all around, can’t wait to go back next year.