Question of the Day - 25 October 2024

We have no idea what prompted this question, but we're pleased to answer it; Wendover (which straddles the Utah-Nevada state line on Interstate 80) is a favorite destination of ours. And it does have a "rich" and compelling history.

Wendover sits on the western side of what was once Lake Bonneville, which covered a large area of northwestern Utah to a depth of 1,000 feet. The lake had no outlet and as it shrank and then disappeared (except for a little remnant, now called Great Salt Lake), it deposited a smooth layer of salt and other minerals in the lowest point of the Bonneville basin roughly 16,000 years ago. That's where the famous Bonneville salt flats are now. 

The Central Pacific Railroad bypassed this area by 30 miles to the north in the late 1860s, but the Western Pacific pushed tracks across the salt flats in the early 1900s. Wendover was founded to supply water to the railroad (piped in from Pilot Peak springs, 25 miles west), the only water on the main line for 100 miles.

In 1914, the anonymity of this sleepy railroad village was lost forever when speedsters discovered the advantageous features of the flats, which cover 30,000 acres; one Teddy Tazlaff set the first land-speed record driving a Blitzen Benz at just under 142 miles per hour and put Wendover on the map and in the media.

Highway 40, the forerunner of Interstate 80, arrived in the mid-1920s and the Wendover Army Air Field was created in 1940. At 3.5 million acres, it was one of the largest military bases in the world. Pilots, navigators, and bombardiers learned and practiced their skills over this range. The crews of Enola Gay and Bockscar, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers that dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, and "Fat Man" on Nagasaki, both trained at Wendover.

After the war, speed freaks kept returning to Bonneville, eventually bringing jet cars with them. Craig Breedlove pushed his famous Spirit of America just past 600 miles per hour, the first to hit that speed, in 1965. Gary Gabelich and his Blue Flame set a record at 622 mph in 1970 that stood for 14 years, until Richard Noble hit 634 mph in 1983 on the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. 

By then the Bonneville Salt Flats had started to deteriorate; the depth of the salt crust was measured at as much at 3 feet in the 1950s, but had shrunk to just a couple of inches by 2015. So the jet cars started migrating to the Black Rock, where Andy Green achieved 713.9 in September 1997 and 760.3 a month later, a record that still stands. 

Today, West Wendover on the Nevada side is a fairly booming border town, with a population of around 4,500 and several casinos. Three of them -- Peppermill, Rainbow, and Montego Bay -- are owned by Peppermill, with its distinctive red-and-blue neon and silk-flower decor that it's justly famous for. Wendover proper in Utah is much sleepier with around 1,100 people, but you can still visit the salt flats and the Wendover Airfield.

One detail about the approach to Wendover on I-80 can't go unmentioned. A few miles west of Wendover, the interstate crosses a small rise on the edge of Three-Mile Hill. At the summit is a pullout where, especially if you have binoculars along, you get a great view of the salt flats stretching all the way to the eastern horizon. They're absolutely level -- flat as a flounder, flat as a pool table, flat as a dance floor, flat as week-old beer. So flat, in fact, that the dark gray stripe of freeway across them is visibly arched. This is one of the few places in the world where you can so clearly observe the foxy curvature of our Mother, Earth.