The Salt Flats, Utah

You have to remember that the Salt Flats used to be the bottom of a huge lake. Seasonally, the Salt Flats remember their origin and fill up with a few inches of water. This preserved the surface of the salt and makes it almost perfectly flat. The Salt Flats are just one of the unreal places in the vast Western Desert of Utah as it is locally referred to. The official name of the desert is the Great Basin Desert. Here is a description of the Great Basin Desert from Wikipedia:

The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey. It is a temperate desert with hot, dry summers and snowy winters. The desert spans a large part of the state of Nevada, and extends into western Utah, eastern California, and Idaho. The desert is one of the four biologically defined deserts in North America, in addition to the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts.