Tooele County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Tooele County

Thirty thousand acres of pure halite salt crust averaging 5 ft thick — that is the Bonneville Salt Flats inside western Tooele County, the largest contiguous salt flat in the Western Hemisphere and the dried-bed remnant of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, a 19,800-square-mile freshwater lake that filled most of western Utah from roughly 30,000 to 14,500 years ago before its catastrophic Bonneville Flood drained the lake to its modern Great Salt Lake remnant through the Red Rock Pass spillway into the Snake River in present-day Idaho. The salt crust was deposited as the lake desiccated; today the surface is flat to within inches across miles and produces a hard, dry, low-friction racing surface dating back to the first land-speed-record attempt on the flats in 1914 by Teddy Tetzlaff in a Blitzen Benz. Wheel-driven absolute land-speed records (the records that exclude jet-and-rocket-powered cars, which Black Rock Desert NV monopolizes for technical-spectator-safety reasons) have all been set at Bonneville — current standing record 470.444 mph by Vesco Turbinator II in 2018 per FIA certification.

Speed Week (the second full week of August) and World of Speed (mid-September) compress 500+ entry-list teams into one-week organized race meets run by the Southern California Timing Association and the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association. RVs camp directly on the salt flats during race weeks under BLM-issued event permits. Tooele County's 6,941 sq mi wrap the entire western Utah desert from the I-80 corridor north to the Idaho line, the Stansbury Mountain Range, and the Dugway Proving Ground (a US Army chemical-and-biological-weapons testing range, public access strictly prohibited). Outside race weeks, BLM Salt Lake Field Office permits 14-day dispersed camping across the salt flats and the West Desert public lands accessed via I-80 exit 4 — the only designated approach off the freeway. The Pony Express Trail Scenic Backway (a partially-paved BLM-administered byway following the 1860-61 Pony Express stage-station route across the West Desert south of I-80) is a 133-mile dirt-and-gravel rig-friendly drive only in dry conditions; portions become impassable to any vehicle after rain. Tooele town (population 35,742, the county seat) anchors the eastern county.