With the annual Bonneville Speed Week cancelled for the second year in a row—and with other racing events at the Bonneville Salt Flats already nixed or in jeopardy of not taking place this year—thanks in part to diminishing salt levels, racers and land-speed racing enthusiasts have started looking for ways to replenish the salt flats. And for somebody to blame.
“We want to try to do something beyond another study,” said Stuart Gosswein, senior director for federal government affairs for SEMA and one of the leaders for the Save the Salt Coalition. For that reason, Gosswein said that Save the Salt has begun talks with “all interested parties,” including the racing community, the Intrepid Potash mining company and the Bureau of Land Management.
Specifically, Gosswein said that Save the Salt intends to put together a reclamation plan with the aim of increasing the amount of salt on the salt flats. Ultimately, Gosswein said, he’d like to see racers once again compete on 13-1/2-mile courses rather than the shorter 3-, 5- and 7-mile courses they’ve been forced to use in recent years. He’d like to do so by requiring Intrepid Potash, which operates on the south side of Interstate 80, to add more salt to the area of the salt flats reserved for racing, which lies on the north side of Interstate 80—more, that is, than Intrepid’s already added.
“Before 1997 (when the salt replenishment program began), 50 to 75 million tons of salt were transferred away from the salt flats,” Gosswein said. “What’s been done so far has probably stabilized the salt flats, but it doesn’t replenish it.”
He noted that Intrepid only mines the salt flats for the potash and potassium contained within, which only makes up about three percent of what the mining company removes. The rest, pure salt, is essentially waste material that Gosswein said actually makes for a stronger racing surface.
Potash had been mined from Bonneville since the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Bureau of Land Management, tasked with overseeing public lands including the Bonneville Salt Flats, determined that potash mining “may be causing the salt layer to thin and retract” and that “such diminshment would degrade the unique geology and historical relevance of the site and would disrupt the recreational opportunities that have been part of the BSF for over 80 years.” It then worked with the mining company from 1997 to 2002 on an experimental and voluntary salt laydown program, one that the BLM, in its own assessment of the program, described as insufficient.
The reason comes from under the surface of the salt flats. Thanks to the decades of salt depletion, underground aquifers have become less salty. As a result, they absorb about 90 percent of the salt brine that’s been laid down on the salt flats, Gosswein said, not nearly enough to make an impact on the salt thickness or on the expanse of the salt flats.
“Our frustration is that the salt is filtering down and not rebuilding on the surface,” he said. “We need to make sure the Bureau of Land Management acknowledges the tons of salt that have been removed from the salt flats. We need a reclamation plan in place, and they’d be the ones to approve it. If there’s anything good about Bonneville getting cancelled, it’s that it’s brought together all these parties to discuss the problem.”
Meanwhile, a more grassroots effort has taken a more radical approach to the diminishing salt. Sam Dakin, a Bonneville racer from Kansas City, has started a WhiteHouse.gov petition that calls for an immediate halt to all Intrepid Potash mining activities and that calls out the BLM for failing to protect and restore the salt flats. In a post on LandRacing.com, Dakin noted that the BLM’s assessment above “makes clear that the Salt Laydown Project has not only failed in rebuilding the crust, it has actually accelerated the problem.”
“I think the first course of action must be to shut off the pumps,” Dakin wrote. “Second would be fill in the drainage ditches. I have no hope of a restoration effort by Intrepid or the BLM. Perhaps the salt will reform; I hope it doesn’t take another 14,000 years.”
As of this writing, about a week after Dakin began the petition, he’s gathered about 1,100 of the 100,000 signatures needed to advance the petition to White House staff.
Gosswein, who said he knows of the petition, said it’s “well meaning but misplaced. We’re not asking the mining company to stop—they contribute, it’s just that they’ve got plenty of salt and we need to find a way of returning it to our side of the highway.”
The Save the Salt reclamation plan should return noticeable results in the next year or two, Gosswein said, but it may take a decade or more to bring 13-mile courses back to the salt flats.
