G&T's Excellent Adventure

THUR., JUNE 6th thru FRI, JUN 7th, 2024

We had an interesting 167-mile ride from Heber City, Utah to West Wendover, Nevada landing at the Wendover KOA Journey. First we enjoyed seeing lush green mountainous terrain that looked like we were driving thru a wall of green. Then that morphed into flatter, more barren terrain west of Salt Lake when the salt flats came into view, which looked like snow on the sides of the road. Bizarrely picturesque. We also had train tracks running along I-80 for miles and passed two salt processing plants along the same highway. Lastly we passed a giant abstract modern sculpture that sits along I-80 called “Metaphor,” considered the Utah Tree of Life. Interesting. 

When we came into town, we saw Wendover Will, who has been around here since 1952 welcoming folks to town or more likely casino goers. This is definitely a casino town! Wendover Will is 63 feet tall and was named the “World’s Tallest Mechanical Cowboy” by the Guinness Book of Records. 

We did have a few hiccups today… first the exit we were supposed to take to the Wendover KOA was closed. Mary gave us a heads up on that which was very helpful, and I was able to figure out a work around. Then we get here and are setting up, and I start to open the bedroom slide but stop because it’s making a funny sound. Not good. I got Gary to come investigate. Turns out the glide support piece for that slide had come loose. Bummer. Gary & Joe worked on it for several hours. It was an awkward, tight space to be working in. Ultimately they had to give up for the day. We need some additional hardware items which will have to wait until we’re in a bigger city… like Salt Lake in a few days. So we’re sleeping with the slide in for now. Not the end of the world, but I don’t have access to half my drawers… hmmm could be a good excuse to shop! Just kidding. 

Tomorrow we’re visiting the Bonneville Salt Flats. 

Friday, June 7th, (2024) we visited the Bonneville Salt Flats International Raceway. Not a building in site! They must bring in what they need when there are races. As stated “The purest salt is hard as concrete when dry and makes the world’s best racing surface.”

This area is also known as the Great Salt Lake Desert. The salt flats were left behind when Ancient Lake Bonneville evaporated, leaving a vast concentration of salt and minerals. The flats are composed of potassium, magnesium, lithium, and sodium chloride (common table salt) ranging in thickness from less than 1 inch to 6 feet. We only saw thicknesses of less than an inch when we walked out on the surface.

The 3,000-square-mile salt flats are 35% larger than any other salt bed worldwide and are one of the flattest areas on earth. Supposedly if you stand at a certain spot, you can actually see the earth’s curvature.

The name Bonneville Salt Flats comes from Captain Benjamin Bonneville, an officer in the U.S. Army, who employed a frontiersman in 1833 to map the area. The frontiersman called the area Bonneville Salt Flats. Apparently it stuck! 

Afterwards we visited the Historic Wendover Army Air Base. The Army Air Base’s Officer’s Service Club has been painstakingly refurbished. Now, it’s a museum but the space can also be rented out for weddings, parties etc. They even had a WWII Control Tower that was restored. Joe & I were the only two that decided to climb it! A little scary at the top for me. I took one photo at the top and then started my descent! The original plane used in the Conair movie is here. There were other buildings still on base but they were in serious disrepair. Although we did see the Nurses’ Quarters. 17 nurses would have called one building home. We could see how they tried to make their personal space more homey. 

During World War II, Wendover Air Force Base hosted as many as 17,500 military personnel and 2,000 civilian employees at its peak in 1943. The base was established in 1939 and became a key training site for bomber crews after Pearl Harbor. More than 1,000 aircrews and 21 bomber groups trained at Wendover including the crew that flew the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The Wendover bombing and gunnery range covered 1.8 million acres and was the largest military reserve in the world. Their most significant role was for the Manhattan Project. Wendover was chosen as the base to test the atomic weapons, which eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although no radioactive material was ever at Wendover. The faux bombs or “pumpkins bombs” as they were called were dropped on the salt flats for practice and garnering information. Since we’d visited Los Alamos in New Mexico two years ago and learned more about the Manhattan Project, this felt like coming full circle. Also the Enola Gay spent time here before heading overseas.

On the way home we stopped to see the Victory Highway. At one time the Victory Highway took early auto-pioneers from the East Coast to the West Coast. It opened in 1925 and was used until the 1940s. They had a section of it in town.

Tomorrow we move on to Salt Lake City!