I had seen in my mind’s eye the photograph that I wanted: Sam on the white Bonneville Salt Flats with the Silver Island Mountains in the background.  I had not imagined the lady screaming at me in Spanish.

If you take the most direct freeway routes, you can get from Salt Lake City, UT to Boise, ID in a bit over five hours. The drawback to that route is that you miss one of Utah’s most impressive natural features: the enormous salt flats to the west of Great Salt Lake.  I decided to take the slightly more scenic route, which would bring me through the salt flats in general and the Bonneville Salt Flats in particular.  The only drawback would be an extra 100 miles added to my journey for the day, pushing the time behind the wheel to around seven hours. I knew it would be worth it to get that photo.

There were a variety of ways to get from the pavement of Interstate 80 onto the salt itself.  The simplest approach would have been to simply drive off the freeway and onto the salt; there were no fences, the salt was about 10 feet from the road, and the only thing between the tarmac and the salt was the gravel of the shoulder.  However, there was a lot of debris along the road, and it wasn’t clear how solid the shoulder gravel really was.  That, and it wasn’t clear if pulling off the freeway like that would have been legal.

Another alternative was to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats State Park, but that was a bit off the freeway, and I didn’t want to pay any admission fees (I later found out there weren’t any).

Thus, the third alternative: the rest area.  There was a little rest area alongside the freeway just east of the Nevada-Utah border.  It had hundreds of feet of frontage on the beautifully white salt of the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Better still, it had low (~2″) curbs along the border of the parking lot.  The kicker was that there were no signs saying not to drive over the curb and onto the salt, so… well, you can guess what I did.

Sam on the Bonneville Salt Flats, with the Silver Island Mountains in the background

The photo session went well, and I was just about to drive back over the curb the other way when a middle-aged woman came running at me, screaming in Spanish.  My escape was foiled.

Luckily, I’ve become so relaxed on this trip that encounters with such people do nothing to break my cool demeanor.  I let her ramble on in excited Spanish for a while before telling her that I had no idea what the hell she was saying.  Pro tip: don’t use profanity to tell an angry person that she is incomprehensible.  More agitated Spanish spewed forth, this time with arm waving.

Eventually, I ascertained that the lady was in charge of keeping the rest area clean, and she was pissed that Sam’s salty feet were going to spoil her supposedly salt-free curb… or something. There was salt everywhere already, not to mention dozens of tire tracks attesting to the fact that I was not a pioneer in driving over the curb.  In fact, I chose that spot to drive from the parking lot to the salt in part because there were so many salty tire tracks already there.

I like how the clouds and mountains lead to a gap to frame Sam

I figured it wasn’t going to do much good to point out the lack of signs at the rest area, the existing tracks to and from the salt, or the fact that she didn’t have the authority to stop me.  Instead, I lo siento‘ed and shoulder shrugged my way into a compromise: I would drive Sam over a section of curb about three feet to the side of my original route, and in return, she would not get run over.

I felt a bit bad for her as I sped away.  The view was great at that rest stop, but it would be a miserable spot to have to work all day, every day.  However, if she didn’t want people doing what I and many, many others before me had done, a sign would have been sufficient.