Taking The Picture at Bonneville

Posted on October 3, 2011 in Photography Photos Vacation Fall 2011

The world’s flattest place offers little if you can’t or won’t pay the entrance fee into the area where they run the test runs for the world’s fastest vehicles, but the one free memory it leaves you is potent.

My family visited Salt Lake City every couple of years because both sets of my grandparents (gentiles all!) lived there, but we always took the road that came through Las Vegas and Cedar City, never the one that shot through Wendover and across the Bonneville Salt Flats.

The highway here is so straight that the state of Utah has put up signs warning drivers against falling asleep. You start in Wendover, hit a few steel plates that the Utah road crews have left — just to wake you up? — and keep going for fifty, sixty, maybe seventy miles eastwards without a single curve to trouble your slumber.

The one big attraction other than the Great Salt Lake and its marshes (which are forty or so miles in) is the Bonneville Race Track which I first knew when the Spirit of America set a land speed record there. Drivers of bikes, motorcycles, and cars come to Bonneville because it is one of the flattest places on the planet. If you have ever seen The World’s Fastest Indian, this is the track that the protagonist had set himself out to visit.

It costs $20 to enter the track ($70 if there is an event), so we pulled out a hundred yards or so outside of it to take The Picture. There is only one picture that people come to Bonneville to take. You can, I suppose, capture the mudtracks that nearly claimed the cars of some, but the Picture features a long, grim view of the flats and a range of mountains about two to five miles away.

I got out of the truck and walked about 100 feet onto the flats. Immediately, I felt why it would have been a bad idea to have driven out there: beneath the thin salty crust was a grey mud that gently sucked in your feet. As I set up my tripod, another fellow who had not studied the surface as he got to this point, drove out just behind us and got stuck. I smiled at the Big Whoops and kept setting up my camera. He gunned his engine, spun his wheels, and finally got his wife to do the gas while he jumped up and down in the bed of his truck. This got him out and they parked just off the paved road behind us.

Now mind you, I brought seven cameras on this trip and I used five of them here. The most exciting for me — the one that had my hands trembling as I set it down on the empty lakebed — was the pinhole camera. I estimated the exposure and counted off the numbers as the man’s black dog ran up to my wife and barked as she bent over to pet it.

The couple came over and chatted while I took more pictures. They were on an unplanned road trip, going from place to place to gamble, eat, watch shows, and see the sights. The man laughed as he recounted how he had nearly lost his truck in the mud — everyone who comes to Bonneville wants to race right? — and shook his head at his own boneheadedness. As I brought out more cameras, he asked me if I was a professional photographer. No, I explained, just an enthusiast with a capital E. The camera that interested him most was the one I brought out last — my Instax 210. I took this version of The Picture:

then showed it to him. Word that there were still instant cameras about had not reached him, so I turned around and took a picture of him, his wife, and his dog, gifting them the photo. We all went our separate ways, but I said to Lynn “They were nice people. And they needed a memory.”