The desert of salt: Bonneville Salt Flats in the Great Basin Desert of Utah

A big salt encounter in a place that has seen all. Thirst and hunger, heat and cold, water and dryness, speed records, and even Hollywood movies - License our images here.                       

Feels strange to walk on the bottom of an ancient lake. And stranger yet, to walk on salt more than 500 miles from the ocean. 

We are in the Salt Flats of the Great Basin Desert, a dry emptiness that goes from Utah to California. These are the remains of Lake Bonneville, the largest Pleistocene paleolake in the Great Basin of western North America.

C tasted a piece and her face said it all: potash salt. An overdose of potassium. Careful adventurous girl, nature also has poisons.

The Bonneville Salt Flats were named after the hero of Washington Irving's The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. 

Some say that the French born Benjamin Bonneville never set foot here. But his men did. The captain sent Joseph Walker with a party to explore the Great Salt Lake and find a route to the California of the 1830s - the one that spoke Spanish. 

But in honor to the truth, they were not the first. The forgotten Jedediah Smith crossed the desert in the previous decade. The problem was that nobody talked in depth about him until the publication in 1902 of Hiram M. Chittenden's The American Fur Trade of the West. 

Based in Chittenden narrative, Smith departed from the Great Salt Lake with fifteen men in August 1826 towards California - he reached San Diego. He returned to Utah in May of 1827 with two men, seven horses, and two mules loaded with supplies. The crossing of the Salt Lake desert during the summer was terrible. Only two of the animals survived the perilous journey. 

After the early explorers, to the desert of salt came the pioneers and the Mormons and the racing cars and, of course, Hollywood followed by the more recent crowd of YouTubers and Instagrammers. 

So, here we are, walking in this flatness that screams aloud that Earth is not flat. Blinded by a whiteness of salt surrounded by a few mountains that, once upon a time, were islands. Walking in a lifeless vacuum inhabited by an eerie silence. A salty silence.