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The salt flats are a special sight at sunset. A 12-by-5 mile stretch occupying 300,000 acres of Utah’s pristine west desert, the Bonneville Salt Flats is like no other place on earth. A salt crust ranging from a few inches to 5 feet thick forms a perfectly flat, uniform, blindingly white crust as far as the eye can see.
- Salinas Grandes, Argentina
- Badwater Basin, California, USA
- Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, United States
- Chott El Djerid, Tunisia
- Salar de Arizaro, Argentina
- Etosha Pan, Namibia
- Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
- Makgadikgadi Pan, Botswana
- Salar de Atacama, Chile
- Devil’s Golf Course, United States
1 At an altitude of approximately 3,350 meters (10,990 feet), Salinas Grandes is an enormous salt flat in northwestern Argentina. Actually, it’s the biggest salt flat in Argentina and the second-largest salt flat in the world. The Salinas Grandes is nearly 60 km (37 miles) from end to end and it’s an increasingly important source of income for the ...
2 For your next trip to California, make sure to visit Badwater Basin! The Badwater Basin salt flats located in the heart of California’s Death Valley National Park are the lowest point in North America, with an elevation of 86 meters (282 feet) below sea level. These great salt flats cover an area of nearly 518 sq km (200 sq mi), among the largest...
3 Located on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah and west of Salt Lake City are the Bonneville Salt Flats, which were formed 17,000 years ago as a salt lake Bonneville. As the water evaporated over millennia, a thick layer of salt remained on the lakebed. Today the crust is replenished naturally by winter rains, which carry miner...
4 Chott el Djerid is a large endorheic salt lake in southern Tunisia, close to the Algerian border. Chott el Jerid was some thousand years ago part of the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike the Bonneville Salt Flats, Chott el Djerid is huge. With an estimated surface area of 6,000 sq km (2,317 sq mi), it’s the largest salt pan of the Sahara Desert. “Chott” ...
5 A trip to Argentina won’t be complete without visiting this salt flat. In the arid, high plateau of Argentina’s Salta province, just east of the Atacama Desert and the eastern cordillera of the Andes Mountains, dry lake beds indicate a time when the landscape was bathed in water. Today it is dry rock crusted in salt—the remnants of evaporation, b...
6 If you’re planning a trip to Namibia, Etosha Pan is a must-visit. Yes, it’s an underrated recreation spot, but you won’t regret visiting this salt flat! The Etosha Pan is a vast, bare, open expanse of shimmering green and white at 130 km (81 miles) long and up to 50 km (31 miles) wide. Like other great salt flats, the landscape of Etosha Pan is m...
7 Salar De Uyuni, the biggest and probably the most popular salt flat in the world, is located in southwest Bolivia near the crest of the Andes, at 3.650 meters (11,975 feet) above sea level and stretches for 10,582 sq km (4,086 sq mi). Some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a giant prehistoric lake. When the lake dried, it left ...
8 Once the site of the world’s biggest island seas is Makgadikgadi Pan. Also one of the largest salt flats in the world, it’s all that’s left of the formerly massive Lake Makgadikgadi that dried up tens of thousands of years ago. According to recent studies, modern Homo sapiens first began evolving in this region around 200,000 years ago! Technical...
9 There are many great salt flats in the world, and Salar de Atacama is certainly one of them. As the name suggests, this salt flat is set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, which is probably the driest place on earth. Clay and carbonate-rich material is the source of the white hue that surrounds the salt flat’s perimeter. Meanwhile, the center is made up ...
10 If the Bonneville Salt Flats are some of the smallest salt flats, the Devil’s Golf Course is the biggest one in the United States! It’s situated within the legendary Death Valley National Park in California. Like other great salt flats, this one also has a unique name. Its catchy moniker comes from a line in the National Park Service’s 1934 guid...
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Managed by the BLM as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern and Special Recreation Management Area, the Bonneville Salt Flats are a 30,000 acre expanse of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake basin in Utah. "Bonneville" is also on the National Register of Historic Landmarks because of its contribution to land ...
- John Misachi
- Devil's golf course. Devil's golf course covers the surface of the Mojave Desert which is within the Death Valley National Park. The valley was initially covered by Lake Manly to a depth of about 30 feet.
- Cono de Arita. Salar de Arizaro is the sixth largest salt flat in the world and the second largest in Argentina. The salt flat is situated in Los Andes Department, Salta Province.
- Etosha Pan. Etosha Pan is part of the Kalahari Basin located in northern Namibia. It measures 75 miles long and is protected by the Etosha National Park.
- Bonneville Salt Flats. Bonneville Salt Flats covers parts of the Tooele County, Utah. It is one of the several salt pans covering the western parts of the Great Salt Lake.
- Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. The Bonneville Salt Flats are found west of the Great Salt Lake, in western Utah, near the Utah-Nevada border. It looks almost like a frozen lake bed covered with snow, but it actually has a thick crust of salty soil making it impossible for any vegetation to grow.
- Death Valley Salt Flats, California. This salt flat in Badwater Basin is among the largest protected salt flats in the world covering nearly 200 square miles.
- Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Salar de Uyuni might be the most famous salt flat in the world, and at 4,086 square miles, ti’s also the largest salt flat in the world.
- Etosha Pan, Namibia. “Etosha” means “Great White Place,” and what better way to describe this incredibly vast, white salt flat. This dry lake bed is part of the Etosha National Park, one of Namibia’s largest wildlife parks in northern Namibia.
During the fur trapping era of the 1820- 30s, numerous fur trading companies operated in the area of Utah. In 1833, trapper, trader, explorer, and legendary frontiersman Joseph R. Walker mapped and explored the area around the Great Salt Lake and crossed the northern perimeter of the Salt Flats while working for a fur trading company run by Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville.
Feb 9, 2023 · Yes, the salt flats are composed of salt. They are approximately 90% common table salt. The salt is up to 5 feet (1.5 metres) thick near the center of the flats, tapering to a layer as thin as an inch thick at its edges. The Bonneville Salt Flats are free to visit and open to public all year. Driving on the flats may be prohibited at times ...
