For our 12th leg of the trip, we were booked for 10 days at Pony Express RV Park in North Salt Lake, Utah. Our first time in Utah, we will spend an entire month here this trip, staying at four different RV parks. The Pony Express was a great location and fit our needs pretty well–there is never a perfect campsite, we’ve found. The sites were level, which is always a plus, but SO close together. There wasn’t really any comfortable place to sit outside and it seemed like a lot of travelers were just stopping over for the night so we had a lot of in and out activity on either side of us during our stay.
On the plus side, Copper and Charlie enjoyed their daily run and frisbee playtime at the awesome dog park. We love it when we find those kinds of amenities while on the road as it can be tough for the pups to be cooped up in the rig all day, especially on long travel days.
As is the theme of this summer’s trip, Salt Lake City was hot and so we found a few indoor things to pass the time. We went to see Top Gun: Maverick one afternoon and found ourselves a chocolate factory to explore nearby another day.
The highlight of the stay, however, was our road trip to The Bonneville Salt Flats. Located about a 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, the Salt Flats are a packed-down, bright white salt crust that covers almost 50 square miles. It’s crazy to see as it is so perfectly flat and barren and looks like a lake covered with snow. No vegetation of any kind grows in the area.
The only tree we saw was the Tree of Utah–a beautiful abstract sculpture created by Swedish artist Karl Momen sometime in the 80s. The tree is made of cement, as well as a ton of minerals and rocks that are native to Utah. Really cool.
We noticed a bunch of small art “installations” as we drove along the salt flats. Unique pieces of art peppered the landscape, making it all the more beautiful.
And then there were the mirages. It’s the heat that rises from the salty soil that creates those mirages, but we could swear we were seeing pools of water ahead of us as we walked along the salty ground. We thought about how those early explorers, traveling the (now) Lincoln Highway en route to California on hot summer days, were likely driven mad by their visions of water in the salty desert.
We took a drive over to the Bonneville International Speedway — the fastest racetrack on the planet, where land speed records are made. We arrived, unfortunately, one day too late–on a Monday– as we didn’t realize they were wrapping up a weekend of racing. That would have been so cool to see.
This description on their website really sums it up: “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.”
very cool:)