Michael Riley's Blog: A closer look at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2015

While the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2002 supported the achievement of an FIA streamliner-class world record of 405.976 for Al Teague’s Spirit of 76, the salt had already been noticeably shrinking for well over a half century. The 76 is but one shining example of what humans are capable of achieving on the BSF. Photo courtesy of Peter Vincent.

When I met Russ Eyres in the parking lot of the Salt Flats Cafe near the entrance to the Bonneville access road, it was sunny and an unusually cool 81 degrees. Had the SCTA (“Southern California Timing Association”) and BNI (“Bonneville Nationals Inc.”) not canceled it three weeks prior, Speed Week 2015 would have been kicking off right about then, but alas.

As many of you know, the topic of the Bonneville Salt Flats (“BSF”) is an emotionally charged one, and you can imagine it’s especially so in the local area of Wendover and Tooele County.

Indicative of just how raw nerves are, as well as how confusing the whole situation can be, was the headline on the local newspaper, The Wendover Times, I saw being passed around the land speed racers who had gathered along with Russ to talk with reporters about the danger facing the storied National Historic Landmark. The racers chuckled darkly because they were aware of something that the reporter couldn’t possibly have known when he filed the story the day before.

While this year the SCTA had not called off Speed Week because of flooding as it had in 2014 (this time it was due to too little raceable salt), the headline in the Wendover Times scoffed: “Whoops! Bonneville is Dry!”

Only… Bonneville wasn’t dry.

Richard Thomas, a land speed racer from Salt Lake City, Utah, holds up a copy of the rashly headlined Wendover Times in front of the flooded BSF at Land’s End. Photo by the author.

While most of it would be gone by the next day, right then several inches of clear, icy water, slowly flowing southeast from the Silver Island Mountains, filled the basin. The day before, perched atop the rugged peak of one of those mountains with Tony Smith—a Bonneville land speed racer from Lewistown, Montana, who had offered to show us around—we had watched the storm that would flood Bonneville slide down from the Cedar and Stansbury Mountains in the east and begin a long sail across the valley.

Tony Smith knew this spot would be a good vantage point for taking in both the Salt Flats (the blade of white on the horizon emerging from behind the mountain at left) and the saltwater evaporation pools (the cyan area stretching from the center of the horizon to the right of Tony) of Intrepid Mining. In the far distance, the rain has appeared. Photo by the author.

Within the snide headline of this local paper—and the racers’ response to it—is encapsulated much of the complexity of Bonneville. On the surface, it’s the old outsiders-versus-locals dynamic, confused and intensified as it often is by each party’s need for one another. The “outsiders”—racers, mostly—need the Salt Flats to run on because they are one of the world’s flattest, most expansive natural surfaces. And the local community needs the influx of money that the racers bring to make ends meet.

Without the racers who come for the various events on the BSF—Speed Week alone draws over 600 drivers and many more crew and spectators—the Wendover economy suffers. When we checked into our hotel, I asked the desk clerk about this. Her cheery welcoming voice became grave: “This is very bad for us,” she said, then quickly added: “Very bad for Wendover.”

The nearby community is actually two towns, Wendover and West Wendover, one on each side of the Utah-Nevada border.

And this is where things start to get complicated. Land speed racing (“LSR”) affects different elements of the local economy differently, even those that are, on their face, nearly identical. For instance, while the hotel we were staying at was in dire straits due to the absence of racing, that might not necessarily have been the case for the many casinos in town. “Racers don’t gamble,” explained Mike Crawford, a longtime resident of Wendover, Utah, and current mayor who was also at the Salt Flats Cafe that morning.

When I later shared what he said with some of the racers, they agreed about the non-gambling nature of racers, but quickly countered. While it’s true that the casinos don’t make money off them on the slots or tables, they most certainly make up for it with doubled and tripled room rates when LSR events are running.

The complexity of the issue, and the tension, increases when the topic of who’s responsible for the Bonneville Salt Flats shrinking comes up, especially because such conversations must necessarily delve into the questions of why they are shrinking and, for some, of whether they are shrinking at all.

A docent at the Wendover Airfield Museum—where the air crew of the Enola Gay trained—became stony at the suggestion that the nearby mine might be damaging the Salt Flats, lamenting instead unfortunate weather. She pointed out, too, that Intrepid Potash is where some of the local people make their living, adding that the company has given much to the community and the museum.

Vacant hotels and empty streets are the rule in Wells, Nevada, another town in the region of the BSF that doesn’t have the benefit of a popular Historic Landmark or significant mining operation. Photo by the author.

When I reflect on what the docent said, I can’t help wondering what would happen to Wendover if both the Salt Flats and the mine that depends on them disappeared. The surrounding region is dotted with near-ghost towns that are barely surviving on casinos, brothels and restaurants serving mainly people passing through.

Intrepid Potash mining facility, on the south side of Interstate 80, opposite the Bonneville Salt Flats, surrounded by saltwater evaporation ponds. Photo by the author.

Many of those who believe that the BSF is in serious jeopardy place the blame with the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”), the federal agency whose mission it is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”

The BLM’s charge is two-pronged: It is to protect the land held collectively by the citizens of the United States, while at the same time it is to maximize the profitability of these resources.

The Bonneville Salt Flats—which are also on the National Register of Historic Places—are administered by the BLM, and, perhaps due to the department’s conflicted interest, its stance on them wavers significantly, on one hand designating it an “Area of Critical Environmental Concern,” while on the other turning a blind eye toward its current condition in favor of increasing revenue from the mining it has leased on it.

When he was district manager of the BLM for the region in 1989, Gregg Morgan expressed clear concern for the well-being of the Salt Flats in an ESPN special on Bonneville land speed racing. “The study that we completed about a year ago,” he said, “… indicates that we’re still losing about 1 percent of the salt on the surface here each year, and that’s about 1.6 million tons annually. We’re concerned about that because at that rate, in 10 years there will not be racing possibly; in 30 years there won’t be enough salt to sustain what we call the Bonneville Salt Flats.”

To hear then-BLM regional director Gregg Morgan comment on the condition of the salt in 1989, cue to 29:15.

Morgan went on to say that the BLM believes that “the mineral extraction of potash from this area is depleting the resource.” But then, strangely, with cubic acres of salt heaped around the mine in the distance, Morgan adds: “…but we need to update our studies to be sure that is where the salt has been taken.”

For people interested in preserving the Bonneville Salt Flats, especially those who have been involved with them for any length of time, this is a bewildering statement. Just 10 years prior, in 1979, a study—commissioned by the BLM itself and undertaken by the U.S. Geological Survey—describes what is happening at Bonneville and unequivocally identifies its primary cause:

Weather cycles may partly explain changes on the Bonneville salt crust. But the activities of man, such as withdrawing brine and constructing surface-drainage barriers, have altered the hydrologic environment and have had a profound effect on the salt crust… Both the Bonneville and Pilot Valley salt crusts covered less area in 1976 than in 1925… Subsurface flow of brine toward brine-collection ditches removed approximately 1.1 million tons of salt from the flats north of the interstate highway during 1976.

Part of the federal lease collection ditch system, this pumping station is used by Intrepid Mining to keep saltwater flowing away from the salt flats and into its settling ponds. This one is located just beyond the end of Bonneville’s “International Course.” Photo courtesy of Russ Eyres.

Another USGS study, this one undertaken between 1992 and ’93, determined that, while the natural cycles of flooding and redeposition of salt on the Bonneville Salt Flats plays a major role in changing its extent, shape and depth, “the brine-collection ditches [used for extracting potash] east and south of the salt crust are the largest contributions to salt removal…”

Contrary to these government studies, Kevin Oliver, the current district manager of the region containing the BSF, has said “Frankly our science doesn’t show any salt depletion.” Oliver’s source is likely a 2003 study conducted by the BLM which proposes that previous surveys conducted in 1960 and ’74 by the U.S. Department of Transportation as well as one undertaken by the BLM in 1988 were flawed in their methodology, resulting in occasional slight errors in measurement of both depth and, in one case, area.

However, even adjusting for these inaccuracies, the data recorded across the broader historical body of studies indicates the BSF has lost several square miles in extent, and approximately three feet in maximum thickness.

The BLM’s administration believes that the mine is returning as much salt to the flats as it is removing in its harvesting of potash, maintaining what is referred to as a “mass balance.” Intrepid Mining, and before it, Reilly Industries, participated in a voluntary Salt Laydown Project from 1997-2002. Intrepid was recognized in October 2013 by the BLM for being an outstanding example of “leadership and environmental responsibility.”

According to the citation, Intrepid Mining—the latest in a 76-year history of mining lease holders to harvest potash from the BSF—pumped more than 10 million tons of salt back out onto the pan over that time, an average of 600,000 tons a year.

Tom Burkland being interviewed by a film crew for a documentary on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Photo by the author.

But Tom Burkland, who has been coming to Bonneville since 1969 and remembers the salt being thick and as hard as asphalt, is vocal about the flaws in this calculation. Tom is an engineer by trade and holds the SCTA Piston-Driven Land Speed Record at 417.020 MPH. His success on the BSF, and his safety, hangs on gathering good data and analyzing it accurately, so when what the BLM was proclaiming didn’t jibe with what he and other racers were observing, he decided he needed to see the data. To that end, Tom took the bold but logical step of becoming a stockholder in Intrepid.

What Tom discovered when he worked the numbers in the mine’s annual reports was that, while Intrepid had put back 10 million tons of salt over the 15-year time span, it had in fact extracted 150 million tons of salt, of which potash is just around 5 percent. It is unclear why the BLM failed to realize that, rather than maintaining a mass balance, Intrepid had replaced less than 7 percent of what it had taken.

Accessible from the pull-off on Interstate 80, this area of the BSF is one that has benefited from Intrepid Mining’s voluntary Salt Laydown Project. Photo by the author.

Despite the empirical observations of the longtime racers, USGS studies and Tom Burkland’s recent discoveries, the BLM still questions what, if anything is happening to Bonneville. As part of Intrepid’s lease agreement with the BLM, it is funding another study—the findings of which, Tom says, will be moot as he says Intrepid’s documents predict that mining activities will have thoroughly exhausted the Salt Flats in in 2017, the year before the study is completed.

And this is where Russ Eyres comes in. Russ was born and raised on a farm in northwest Iowa where he recalls that, in 1951, he built his first performance vehicle “from windmill framing, a hay bale elevator motor and a pair of Sears & Roebuck wheel barrow wheels.” Russ has been racing, and helping others race, at Bonneville for most of his life, and in that time, he has personally set land speed records in the 200 MPH classes there as well as at Muroc and El Mirage, and his engineering has put 12 or 15 other racers in the red hats of the 200 MPH Club.

Russ Eyres spoke with reporters in the parking lot outside the Salt Flats Cafe on what should have been the first morning of 2015 Speed Week at Bonneville. Photo by the author.

While Russ will be the first person to point out that he’s not a geologist, like Tom he is analytical guy. With a professional background in engineering and computer science in the defense industry, Russ is meticulous, matter of fact and not prone to exaggeration, so when people questioned whether the salt was disappearing, he decided to gather data himself. For Russ, there are other places than Bonneville, “but there are none as good as this, and I want to go racing, so I’m out here trying to help figure out what the conditions are and what’s going on.”

Over the last decade, Russ has come to Bonneville with a small auger, a shovel, a pick, some hand tools, a GPS and a spreadsheet, and methodically sampled the salt pan. The process is thorough; he explained, “I’ve spent the last three days here measuring. I think I’ve drilled about 175 holes in various little places all over the salt, looking for what’s happened, looking for how thick the salt is, what’s under it, what’s on top of it, what’s the surface condition. I’ve also measured with a straight edge and a tape measure because there’s a lot of surface irregularity—that’s a big problem this year.”