Historic Wendover Airfield

The emptiness was the point. When the Army needed somewhere to train bomber crews unseen, it chose this scrap of desert on the salt flats, where the nearest town was a railroad water stop and the horizon gave nothing away. Thousands trained here through the war, but the secret that mattered arrived in 1944: the 509th Composite Group, rehearsing over and over to drop a single enormous bomb none of them could name. From Wendover the crew of the Enola Gay went to Hiroshima. The hangars still stand at the edge of the flats, a museum now.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bonneville Salt Flats — 7.4 mi
  A blindingly white desert where land speed records are born

More markers nearby

• First Continental Telephone Line — 7.2 mi
• Bonneville Salt Flats — 7.5 mi
• Pilot Peak — 14 mi
• Tree of Life — 23 mi