Interstate 80: The Bonneville Crossing
A hundred and thirty miles across the bed of a vanished sea, from Elko to the Bonneville Salt Flats — the crossing that nearly ended the Donner Party and, a century later, rehearsed the atomic bomb.
The Route at a Glance
West of the Great Salt Lake, Interstate 80 runs out of reasons to slow down. From Elko the highway climbs the Pequop and Silver Zone passes, drops onto the floor of a vanished sea, and holds a dead-straight line toward a horizon that keeps its distance. This is the bed of Lake Bonneville, the Ice Age lake that once drowned a third of Utah; what it left behind is some of the flattest, emptiest ground in the country. The towns give out quickly — Wells, then Wendover on the state line — and past Wendover there is nothing but the salt desert until the Wasatch. Fuel up, carry water, and don't trust the pools that shimmer on the pavement ahead; there is no water there at all.
That emptiness has a history, and it is not a gentle one. Eight miles west of Elko, the California Trail Interpretive Center sits on the wagon ruts themselves and tells the story that shadows the whole crossing — the Hastings Cutoff, a shortcut sold by a man who had never taken a wagon over it. In 1846 the Donner-Reed party believed him. A note left in the sagebrush promised the salt desert could be crossed in two days; it took them five, cost them dozens of oxen and several abandoned wagons, and left them so far behind that the Sierra Nevada closed over them that winter. The desert you cross in two air-conditioned hours nearly finished them.
Wendover is a town split in two — West Wendover in Nevada, casino lights burning at the line; Wendover in Utah, quieter and half-emptied. On the Utah side stand the hangars of Wendover Army Air Field, where in December 1944 the 509th Composite Group arrived to train in complete secrecy. They dropped dummy concrete "pumpkin bombs" on the empty flats for months, and in August 1945 the crews who had rehearsed here flew from Tinian to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs they dropped killed well over a hundred thousand people. The field is a museum now, wrapped in the same silence they trained in.
The crossing ends where the salt does. The Bonneville Salt Flats open out just short of the Great Salt Lake — thirty thousand acres of blinding white where, ever since Malcolm Campbell broke three hundred miles an hour here in 1935, drivers have chased the land-speed record down a measured mile too long to see the end of. Speed Week still runs every August, though the crust is thinning and the racers watch it with worry. Pull off at the access road, walk out onto the salt, and stand in the flattest quiet in America. It is a strange place to end a drive, and a hard one to turn around and leave.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
3 stops along the route, in driving order from Elko, Nevada to Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.
- 1
- 2
- 3
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let Interstate 80: The Bonneville Crossing do what it does best.
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