The crystals can look like snow, a moonscape, or even another planet. The landscape is flat, but for 1-inch-raised hexagons of salt crystals formed by cycles of flooding and evaporation. But elsewhere, it's dried out, including at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Water remains in some parts of the lake's footprint, including Utah's Great Salt Lake. The area is what's leftover from Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that filled after the Ice Age, thousands of years ago. In the American West - a region with no shortage of other-worldly landscapes - this crystalline expanse near the Utah-Nevada line is an awe-striking natural wonder. The water's color appears turquoise because it's been dyed by a mining company that channels brine to ponds where it evaporates and leaves behind valuable minerals. Truck drivers, selfie-stick wielding tourists and gamblers driving to the casinos of West Wendover, Nevada, are known to stop here to photograph the stark white landscape, along with canals of flowing water.

The Bonneville Salt Flats sit just off of a highway in a state nowhere near the ocean, but in parts they glimmer as white as a Caribbean beach.

Salt flats in utah reflect