Closure dates may vary and will be posted by sign. Motor vehicle use is limited by seasonal closure during the spring when the salt is moist or has standing water on the surface. The salt flats are generally open to the public for recreational purposes. The salt flats are on the National Register of Historic Places, are designated as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, and are managed as a Special Recreation Management Area. Like the Great Salt Lake, the Salt Flats are a remnant of Lake Bonneville, which covered over one-third of Utah from 10,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Located 120 miles west of Salt Lake City in Tooele County, Utah, the salt flats are a 30,000 acre expanse of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake Basin in Utah. The salt flats are about 12 miles long and 5 miles wide and are comprised mostly of sodium chloride, or table salt. The Bonneville Salt Flats are one of Earth's most unique landforms. Collaborative Action and Dispute Resolution.A project to restore the hardpacked salt has been initated by the chemical company that mines the flats, and the Bureau of Land Management, which owns the land. The hard-packed solid salt area which is used for the races has shrunk from 15 miles in length in 1950, to 10 miles today, and the quality of the surface has decreased.

The raceway, which spends much of the year under water, is slowly disappearing, and many racers are heading to the Black Rock Desert and other dry lakes. Land speed records are classified a number of ways, and the current official land speed record, with a speed sustained for over a mile in distance, is over 700 miles per hour, obtaned by the jet-powered car Thrust 2 at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The Blue Flame, a rocket-powered four-wheeled vehicle, set the land speed record of 631.4 miles per hour in 1970, a record that stood for more than a decade, and the last of the major high speed records set at Bonneville. Numerous land speed records have been achieved at Bonneville, on the vast and flat natural pavement of salt: the 300, 400, 500, and 600 mile per hour land speed barrier were all broken here over the years.

Bonneville salt flats speedway