Leaving Utah

Picture #1
What do you notice about these photos?
Picture #2
It's kind of like that game for kids, What's Wrong with this Picture!
And here's a clue...
Snow on the ground...but not on the mountains!
The man on the snow is walking around in shorts!
It's not snow...it's salt!
The Bonneville Salt Flats! And the salt in a huge pile is the Morton Salt Company.

Imagine a place so flat you seem to see the curvature of the planet, so barren not even the simplest life forms can exist. Imagine the passing thunder of strange vehicles hurtling by on a vast dazzling white plain. This is not an alien world far from earth; it is Utah's famous Bonneville Salt Flats.
The Bonneville Salt Flats is one of the most unique natural features in Utah. Stretching over 30,000 acres, the Bonneville Salt Flats is a fragile resource administered by the Bureau of Land Management. It is located along I-80 near the Utah-Nevada border. Wendover is the closest city.

In the 1960's, jet powered vehicles and names like Craig Breedlove (600.6 mph) and Art Arfons (576.55 mph) captured the imagination of millions. In 1970, Gary Gabolich's rocket car, "Blue Flame", attained a spectacular 622.4 miles per hour.
Since the first speed record attempts in 1914, hundreds of records have been set and broken in a variety of automotive and motorcycle classes.

To read more about the Bonneville Salt Flats go here!

Another piece of trivia about Utah, all of the highway signs around Salt Lake City have a picture of a beehive on them with the highway number on top of that.  No, I didn't get a picture of that but, according to my brother-in-law, it has nothing to do with bee keeping.  It represents the teamwork, family, and a community all pulling together in the same direction.  Nice.

Another bit of information that I heard, when the Mormons came to Salt Lake City and began to homestead the land, planting crops, they were inundated with locusts which started to desimate the only food source they had.  They prayed and pretty soon here come the seagulls from the west coast (a long way), eating all of the locusts. A Mormon miracle!

If there is any error in these stories, they are my errors, I assure you!
Just a few more pictures of our way out of Utah.

Art on the edge of the salt flats.
An abstract artistic sculpture called Metaphor: The Tree of Utah. Swedish artist Karl Momen created the 87-foot high tree between 1982-1986. He financed the project himself to bring bold color and beauty to the stark, flat, salty landscape. The sculpture is made of 225 tons of cement, almost 2,000 ceramic tiles and five tons of welding rod, and tons of minerals and rocks native to Utah.

Easy to become "road hypnotized" out here!
At another rest stop...