“Nobody’s going to go out of business, nobody’s going to lay off people,” Crawford said. The event’s organizer, the Southern California Timing Association, cancelled the 2014 event after racers and fans had already arrived at their hotels. Wendover Mayor Mike Crawford, who owns an auto parts shop in town, said the decision by race organizers to cancel this year’s event while it is still weeks away will be a bigger economic blow than last year, when a monsoon storm left standing water on the track on the eve of the race. Plans to link this remote area to the modern world via new infrastructure are underway, with the mineral wealth hidden beneath this pristine reflective surface leading some to predict Bolivia will be ‘the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century’.The annual Speed Week race in late summer is the largest annual racing event, drawing hundreds of teams and filling restaurants and hotel rooms in the nearby border cities of Wendover, Utah, and West Wendover, Nev., with spectators and pit crews. The region is believed to contain the biggest store of lithium in the world – in demand for its use in lightweight batteries. But now the Bolivian government has ambitious plans for mineral extraction that will bring big changes to the isolated landscape. But, come the rainy season (roughly November to April), it is often covered with a shallow layer of water, which makes it hard to tell where land ends and the sky begins.įor years, only intrepid tourists and saleros (salt gatherers) have made it to this remote place. It is almost 100 times larger than the famous Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA, and so flat that NASA uses its surface to calibrate sensors on board satellites.ĭuring the dry season, from May to October, the surface crust of sodium chloride – more than 10m deep in places – is parched and cracked and looks as though it belongs on another planet. The 12,000sq km salt-encrusted prehistoric lakebed is located in Potosi, southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes, 3,660m above sea level.
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